A True Story

Everyone in my country has a story. The problem is that very few are genuine. Our imagination tends to be as wide as our waistlines. Which, by the way is mainly due to the shalawar kurta. Imagine pants that have an unlimited waistband. From year to year one can grow (horizontally) from cms to inches to hand spans and yes- even feet. All this development takes place without realizing that anything’s changed. Until one day, you can’t bend down to get your shoes. That is, by the way, the reason why this country is overpopulated, because once you reach this stage, children prove to be most useful.

Children are also used as buffers between husbands and wives. There’s really no other way to get ones tension out. A classic sure shot relief is a resounding slap across the face. An everyday, every household example is that at the dinner table. The husband sits at the head of the talble, eats the onions off the salad plate, burps, and asks the wife what’s for dinner. She bitingly replies: “rat poison”. The child starts cracking up at this hilariously childish reply.
Smack!
He’s put in his place by the man of the house (who is incidentally not considered man enough by his mother, much to his wife’s chagrin. But she soon gets to know him after about 5 years of their marriage and tends to agree with his mother by then and hence the resulting cheekiness.) Coming back to our story, now he has to put his wife in her place.

As the wife appears from the kitchen, the husband thinks of the ultimate insult- an attack on her complexion! He says she looks like the daal that hes eating- kaali kalooti!

The child cracks up again and is giving another stinger… this time by his mother. Now both sides of his face hurt.

Not caring much- he finishes his food and goes out for a breather. Now you all must be wondering how such a kid would have had a normal childhood. The thing is that, this universe’s system is so foolproof that it flushes out any sort of discontent in every sort of way. The kid goes looking for his younger brother. Finding him, he catches the little thing by his ears and asks him to either sit in the corner of the room like a murgha (all the while crowing like one) for five minutes, or otherwise forget about a promised candy. Greed being the motivating factor in all of us humans, the poor thing succumbs to taking up that interestingly yogaistic position for 5 minutes, at the end of which his elder brother pops the candy in his own mouth all the while congratulating the kid on learning his first lesson of disillusionment- as he was to get a lot of that in life.

Now that his system was clear, the abuse was passed on to the 5 year old, who after wailing at the top of his lungs without getting at least a peep of inquiry from anyone at the household, decides to stop that useless activity.

In order to let his frustrations out, he decides to take up a sport. What better than the all fulfilling, wholesome, over popular, you’re not a man if you don’t play and you’re not a woman if you don’t have crushes on the players’ game. Yes! CRICKET.

Now you’ll wonder why all these years of practice that started at such an early age resulted in recent un -won world cups? Simple. You see now in order to let all that dementedness out of the system, instead of hitting cricket balls with that bat, that kid went out to his yard, scooped up all the frogs he could find, and lo! Walloped them with all his might across the road, waited for the inevitable “plop” sound and yelled: “CHAKKAAA”.
Now dear readers, you’ll kind of understand them and sympathyse with our revered heroes instead of dissing them out