Saturday, May 17, 2008

Mission " Rescue Assam"

Scene: Drunkard 1 is sitting on the floor.Dressed in his bermudas and a light yellow vest ( which may have been white once upon a time ), he dutifully performs the task of mixing the drinks. He lives up to his reputation of being a good bartender.Years of practice have made him a master at the art of mixing the right quantity of water, soda and whiskey.A man revered in his college circle for his extraordinary ability to drink red rum in neat pegs , he now sits with his head resting on the bed and his eyes contemplating his own pot-belly.Drunkard 2 , dressed in a bermuda and an Iron Maiden T-shirt sits on the bed.He is the official DJ of the night.His eyes scans the entire hard disk of the laptop in front of him , as he searches for the next track.As the screaming guitar solos from ' Afraid to shoot strangers ' draws to an end , drunkard-2 quickly searches for the next track.His eyes fall on a folder titled " Bhupen Hazarika".A bottle of whiskey lies in the centre of the room..with just enough manna from heaven left to make three small pegs.
Meanwhile , Drunkard-3 makes frequent visits to the room to take small gulps from his glass.He has the toughest job in the party tonight.He is charge of the pork.As he sweats out in the kitchen , he curses the other two and thinks aloud as to why he made the blunder of publicising his cullinary skills.
Drunkard-1:"After long time , it feels good to drink man..nothing like college buddies.."
Drunkard-2:" Nothing like this man..sitting on the floor..dressed only in our chaddi-baniyan...absolutely nothing man...just like the good ol' times"
Drunkard-1: " Sometimes I feel i will leave all these stuff and go back to the hills...Oi change the song..man am gettin all nostalgic today..something in Assamese"
Drunkard-2 in a rare moment of courage and inspiration puts on Bhupen Hazarika's "Aami axomiya nohou dukhiya" ( which translates to 'We Assamese will never be poor')

Drunkard-1: "Yes ! yes! Nohou dukhiya k*** ( yes! yes! we will never be poor)"
Drunkard-2: "Yes! You are right..we have everything..tea ,oil , Zubeen Garg..(motioning to the kitchen ) oi bring over the pork..when will we eat if we can't have it with the maal*?"
Drunkard-3 obliges and brings over a few pieces of pork on a steel plate.Taking a quick gulp from his glass , he motions to the others to pour out the remaining whiskey.Now finally relieved from his duties , he offers his inputs to this intellectualy stimulating discussion.
Drunkard-3 : 'what will you call people who have not experienced the heavenly taste of pork?"
Drunkard-1 : 'Backward k***..what do these people know what good cuisine is , huh? Nothin like north-east man..no casteism..religious difference..see how everyone enjoys momos..wait and see..10 yrs from now I will return to Assam.."
Drunkard-3: "( with a sarcastic laugh) 10 years from now Assam will be a part of Bangladesh"
Drunkard-2 : " Yes..all for this fuckinn' central government and the terrorists..we got to do something man"
Drunkard-1: " we have to drive them out..each and every single one...soboke khedim k***."
Drunkark-3 ( sensing a change in the atmosphere )" Hey forget all these stuff man..what happened to the new HR chick you were eying at office?"
Drunkard-1 ( laughing) " Fuck that bitch..there is nothing like our own chicks"
Drunkard-2 " Yes man nothin like our chicks of Handique college* on the day of Saraswati Puja"
Drunkard-1 " So lets raise a toast for them..Joi Aai Axom"
Drunkard-2 & 3 (in unison) : " Joi Aai Axom!!`"

We reach the point where memories of drunken revelry blurs into the reality of a hot scorching sun shining thorugh your window pane on piles of unwashed dishes and a floor littered with cigarette packets and bottles.However one thing I can say with certaininty is that Assam was saved yet again due to the efforts of 3 brave and patriotic young men.

Footnotes:
K*** - A popular 4 lettered Assamese slang which can be used alternatively as adjective , adverb and conjuction.
Maal* - Popular term for alcohol
Handique college* - A girls college in Guwahati.

16 comments:

  1. Hilarious stuff....dry,dark humour...Sakisque.
    And a toast to those days....gahori aru maal

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  2. Awesome Blog...This is the reality of almost every Assamese youth staying in places like Blore and Delhi. In fact in my almost 9 years of bachelor life, I have seen very few exceptions to this.

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  3. something's missing dude.... the conversation is way too familiar. But it gets deeper than that. What about the age-old exploitation. The ignorance regarding assam amongst the rest of India. Cheap weed. Green hills.s The flake which beats all other cigarettes. the love and appreciation for rock and metal. you captured the pork right (Backward kela was a classic one-liner!)

    Somehow even the hostility was missing. Maybe they were not drunk enough! A few more pegs could ope up their hearts and their minds. A little more would open up their mouths too...

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  4. @bulka,
    The point of the story was not to capture a drunken "northeastern" conversation..in which case i have enough personal experiences to write a novel.The point was to show how shortlived our so-called patriotism is and how it fades away with the drop in our level of intoxication

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  5. hi!

    am not assamese but my family belongs there. your post rang a bell, have heard similar sentiments...

    Just a small question once the alcohol vapours dissipate isn't there anything we could do to better the lot of those who have stayed on there?

    Not boasting but my grand parents ensured that their village had a primary, middle and high school, a library and a park for children. They felt the need to give back to a place that had given them so much.

    What are we giving back?

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  6. @pinku
    Thanks for visiting.
    Ya there is lots we can do and i also feel there are lots of young people who really want to give back to the place where they come from .However , with most of them the idea is " let me get settled and then i would do something"Unfortunatley ,in this dog eats dog world you are never really " settled".Kudos to your grandparents, but they came from a diferent generation where people were attached to the idea of " place"..for our generation the attchment is with another idea called " oppurtunity"

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  7. I object...and I am pissed off.
    It is not xenophobia, but Pinku is wrong by a long way when she says "..we could do to better the lot of those who have stayed on there?".
    It isnt exactly a drought-ridden or poverty-striken world out there in Assam as this sentence seems to imply. It is not like the movies where the young man leaves his village, goes on to make his life and never returns. Assam is not the village which one must leave to make it big.

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  8. Hi polka,

    thanks for understanding where i come from. sujoy though seems very pissed off.

    sujoy, i dont know which part of assam u belong to. But my village is a 2 hour ride away from the nearest railway station. And the village is not growing, we keep getting requests from people there for jobs and oppurtunities in Delhi or Calcutta.

    and i still remember being asked by a young woman how many seas I crossed to reach the place from delhi. and believe me she was not joking or pulling my leg.

    I am not saying assam is a poverty ridden state all i am saying is that we can ensure that we give back to the places which are a part of our past.
    it can be equally true of my neighbourhood in delhi or the country in general.

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  9. wow..a war of words on this parched digital wasteland..what better publicity can i dream of!!

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  10. Hi ,

    I was reading ur blog posts and found some of them to be wow.. u write well.. Why don't you popularize it more.. ur posts on ur blog polkaexercisinghisfingers took my particular attention as some of them are interesting topics of mine too;

    BTW I help out some ex-IIMA guys who with another batch mate run www.rambhai.com where you can post links to your most loved blog-posts. Rambhai was the chaiwala at IIMA and it is a site where users can themselves share links to blog posts etc and other can find and vote on them. The best make it to the homepage!

    This way you can reach out to rambhai readers some of whom could become your ardent fans.. who knows.. :)

    Cheers,

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  11. King Pol seems desperate to hog the limelight!!!

    The role of 'Drunkard 2' has been christened by the honourable author himself from one of those 'good ole moments' frozen in time.

    The author is blissfully oblivious of the fact that being the pioneer of the revolutionary concept of 'Polkism' (named after the author himself) where time and space cease to have any meaning as the part melts into the whole, he has already earned enough international acclaim not to indulge in these cheap publicity stunts!!

    POLS! In your next blog please provide your esteemed connoisseurs a sneak peek into the fascinating world of POLKISM and its seeming relevance (or irrelevance) in today's "parched digital wasteland".


    VIVA KING POL !!!

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  12. too good k***! felt like i was drunkard no.3 myself. keep writing stuff like this, it's really good bro.

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  13. i agree with sujoy when he says "It isnt exactly a drought-ridden or poverty-striken world out there in Assam", but i would also like to add that the northeast... not only assam is a very neglected part of India... the metros are full of people from the northeast, ULFA has a base in Bangalore for instance, but the rest of the country doesn't know jack shit about the N.E.

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  14. //10 years from now Assam will be a part of Bangladesh//
    very valid point...

    but what happens when the alcohol effect is gone ... does the brain still talk sensible ...

    wonderful post there... :)

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  15. I do not know whether this story is based on your imagination or with bit influence of our real life back in Pune!

    But am sure it has just brought me those nostalgic memories in my mind, when you, me and Deva Bhai had in 2005-2007.

    Good Luck Buddy! Keep writing......

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