Merry. Mary. Lamb. Pnatha. Chicken. Idiots.

It's Christmas day today, 2009. Merry Christmas, dear reader.

People usually have turkey today, roasted. Or chicken, when they think of doing something interesting sometime. They might taste good depending on whether you like the cranberry sauce or whether you hate turkey. But the truth is, turkey is served and eaten, disregarding whether it's cold or hot. And you know what? It gets really interesting when someone wants to see whether you have the moronic expression akin to having cold turkey if you are being treated like a chicken. Before you try to decipher the previous sentence, let me share a long joke, probably not without relevance, since it is 25th December.

Jesus and Satan have a discussion as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they come to an agreement to hold a contest, with God as the judge.

They sit themselves at their computers and begin. They type furiously, lines of code streaming up the screen, for several hours straight. Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning strikes, taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over.

He asks Satan to show what he has come up with. Satan is visibly upset, and cries, "I have nothing. I lost it all when the power went out."

"Very well, then," says God, "let us see if Jesus fared any better."

Jesus enters a command, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers. Satan is astonished.

He stutters, "B-b-but how? I lost everything, yet Jesus' program is intact. How did he do it?"

God smiled all-knowingly, "Jesus saves."

It's a real joke and generally not considered as a PJ. I wonder why this joke wasn't at all used, in "3 idiots" especially when the moviemakers were being resourceful of all the usual email forwards and jokes one could have encountered since the eternity of Internet. Aal; including the arab sheikh taking a photograph of 5 burqa-clad women. Yeah, it is that up-to-date with Aamir Khan, the protagonist, being the 80% Jesus and 20% Gandhi (coming from Rajkumar Hirani, you ought to expect the latter proportion part for sure). I'm also sure that while making this watershed movie in Indian cinema, where water is coming from a human penis with a hissing sound and helps people in being eletrocuted sometimes, Mr Hirani was as fearless as it could ever be possible for any filmmaker.

Well, when you have the courage to make a movie where flourmills are made out of bicycle, where finding and replacing "chamatkar" with "balatkar" in a word document doesn't really stay limited in paper (or word), where a young engineering male student is shown to strum his guitar in the heat of the night as he is depressed and sings "nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nya.....jeene do jeene do" only to drown further into gloom and commit suicide out of his inability of completing a battery-operated aeroplane with a wireless surveillance camera within 24 hours, you should be expecting the messiah to appear and solve all your home, neighbourhood and toilet problems, chanting "aal izz well".

To quote from the movie, "Whatever the problem in life is... just always say to yourself 'Aal Izz Well'.. This won't solve your problems but it will give you the courage to face it.."

That tagline should explain it aal......including the photoshopped place curiously named as Ladakh where the messiah lives, ......after he turns a recluse and generously gives the world 400 patents and a kid's engineering school, preceded by delivering babies with the help of vacuum cleaners and curtains.

Only snag--the revelation behind choosing Christmas Day as the movie's release date was increasingly getting visible as time was flowing on. Of course, being a Bengali, helped; as always. "murgi kora" could always be invented and used in a different connotation by this meat-loving ethnic group, and I wonder whether and how Mr Hirani knew about this.

But what the heck. It has got the saviour of Indian Cinema in it, and it doesn't matter counting the number of idiots as long as movie-makers would be counting cash.

All's well that end's well, especially when you had problems. That's the take home message of the last 2009 bollywood blockbuster, apart from the abundant toilet humour; if you didn't like them, you have the only option of using the flash. Not the one in a camera.........the other one.

speaking of which....

One of my respondents was telling me the other day, while talking about ties with a friend of hers--that they don't talk much, but that she reads the friend's blogs; and she puts in her comments sometimes. But it's not that they meet so much or talk so much. But my respondent said that she is always checking on the friend's blog, and they communicate that way.

And she wondered aloud the nagging, quintessential question--is it good or bad?

I have a couple of friends with who I might not exchange notes through email or scraps in orkut, but whose blogs I will always visit; some of them were quite good friends in college. Some are people I barely know. Sometimes I do put in my blahs on their imprints, and sometimes I don't.

And I wonder, is the above-mentioned process a farcical mode of communication in the sense that we actually don't communicate, but do it on a somewhat forced skewed direction by feeling the civility to say something when thoughts are written aloud? Is it akin to small talk on a blogger level? Is it page 3? (and me ain't Konkona) Is it stalking and saying "Hi" when you make eye contact with your person of interest (it's easy to see who visited your blog....)?

Is it preferable to anything or should it be nothing?

That reminds me: I have someone coming from Baton Rouge on a regular basis and I don't know who that is; I just know that this person first came to my blog following a link in orkut and now s/he just types the url from memory (thank you and bless you) and reads my blog. Silently, without communicating through comments.

With all due respect to Ms Dorothy Smith, it doesn't take long to realize that writing is a reflexive process and a two-way communication; you think of what you want to write, and you also think about the reader who is going to read that and while that defnitely shapes your writing, the reader also communicates with you while s/he is reading your lines on and interpreting them, understanding them, nodding (or smirking) or skipping or re-reading them.


Not that everything must have some utilitarian values per se, but does it actually create/maintain/strenghten any links? This kind of "communication?" Or is it, just there, as a product, to be tasted and/or tested according to availability of time and whims? Does it make others know or understand better?

Or, does it help to understand the mind of people with who you don't communicate as a matter-of-fact in the traditional sense, but which you might do, in a less tangible way, considering you read their blogs (and supposedly, a piece of their mind).

Is a traditional mode of communication a necessary condition to get to know a person? But then, the most basic questions, such as, "How are you?" have always got the most parochial of answers.