Vittachi

The only truly timeless blog on the planet

World’s earliest blogger had his work cut out for him

By Nury Vittachi

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The world’s first blogger has been found. It’s an Indian nerd. (What a surprise.) Stand up and take a bow, Ashoka Piyadassi of northeastern India. Yay!

Well, actually, he can’t stand up and take a bow because he’s dead. Ashoka started (and finished) writing his blog a long time before any other rival claimants to the title: 2000 years earlier, to be precise.

Now I know what you are thinking. How could this guy have written a blog so long ago, two millennia before the invention of the key elements of on-line diary-writing, which are, of course, abject self-centredness and atrocious spelling?

Well, historians now believe that self-centredness is actually a lot older than most people think. It was invented by a woman named Eve, who looked at a fruit tree and thought: “Rules, schmools, I need a low-cal snack that won’t go to my hips.”

And bad spelling? William Shakespeare, often described as the world’s greatest author, frequently misspelled his own name, sometimes writing it “Francis Bacon”.

For Ashoka, 2000 years ago, the big challenge was equipment. Wi-fi was in short supply, so his blog posts were literally posts. He chiseled them into rock pillars and delivered them by hand to vast numbers of places all over the Known World.

Now you may well be thinking: how come I never heard of this guy? Few people have. I reckon it’s because historians have listed his inscribed pillars in their dusty tomes as The Edicts of Ashoka.

               But I’ve read the things. They are no more edicts than my laundry lists are (and I write great laundry lists). No, Ashoka’s posts are a self-serving list of personal achievements (“I dug some wells”) interspersed with idle thoughts on how to fix the world’s problems (“let us all be vegetarians”). His posts run on a casually egomaniac assumption that the rest of humanity will benefit from access to his unedited thoughts: the unmistakable stamp of the blogger.

Of course, Ashoka lived in a different era so his interests differ from ours. In one posting, he tells us his household has gone vegetarian “except for one deer and two peacocks every day”. In my house we barely get through a deer and two peacocks a week, unless we’re really hungry.

Today, there are 120 million blogs. Fears have been expressed that they may sound the death-knell of newspapers. But then every invention, including radio, television, the hula hoop, peanut butter, the deodorizing insole and the padded brassiere have been credited with sounding the death-knell of newspapers.

We’re still here. Some Asian newspapers, such as the rivals of the ones I write for, can be pathetically dull, but even they are interesting compared to what you read in today’s blogs.

Possibly the dullest blog ever can be found at wiblog.com. One entry, entitled “Standing in the Middle of the Room”, reads as follows: “I was standing at a central point in the room. The walls were all at approximately the same distance from me. I continued to stand there for a few moments.” 

Be still, my heart. Thrilling stuff.

One guy in my office tells me that there are some bloggers who are not rampant egomaniacs.  I’m impartial enough to be willing to record his point of view.

But I should also point out that he also believes in the tooth fairy.

Your name is your fortune

Be sure to write your name in The Book of Morons

By Nury Vittachi

*

Strangers were giving me curious glances. Were they attracted by my Adonis-like good looks? Bizarrely not. They were smiling, but in a sneering sort of way. I smiled back at them, but they became sneerier, and if that isn’t a word, it should be.

An hour later, I discovered why. I’d been to a breakfast symposium and had been wearing my name badge for the following two meetings, one bus ride, one nap and two coffee breaks.

One colleague told me she’d once gone to a morning briefing and forgotten to remove her name badge for three meetings, a formal dinner and a one-night stand. In the end, it was the hotel breakfast room waiter who finally said, “Do you know you are still wearing a big ugly name tag from some meeting?” All the people with whom she had interacted, some acrobatically, had not mentioned it.

But the record must go to the cousin of a friend of mine who went to a half-day symposium and then wore her name badge for the next SEVEN MONTHS.

This is how it happened. She’d accidentally had it on for about five hours when a particularly noxious co-worker gloatingly pointed out that she had forgotten to take it off.

“I’m keeping it on on purpose,” she lied. “I prefer to.”

After that, she HAD to keep it on. She soon discovered that having everyone know her name changed her life. She made dozens of friends from people who tried to help her. “People who take the trouble to try to save a stranger from embarrassment are usually nice,” she said.  

It soon became the case that at every shop and café she frequented, staff greeted her by name and passers-by assumed she was a celebrity. In fact, she WAS more or less a celebrity, and is well-placed to run for President of the World one of these days.

               This woman had stumbled open a fact known already by religious types, such as a friend of mine who believes in a holy book called, unbelievably, The Book of Morons. He believes wearing a name badge is a great conversation starter—although I haven’t yet worked out why all members of his sect are spotty young boys called “Elder Johnson”.

                Anyway, businesses spend fortunes making sure their names are widely circulated, so why shouldn’t individuals do the same? But of course it depends what your name is. Adolf L. Hitler Marak, a politician from Maghalaya in India, is possibly an exception.

                I once knew a Hong Kong pastor named Rob who always got a warm welcome when he visited prisons. He later discovered that new prisoners had their crime pinned on their shirts and everyone saw his name badge, and assumed he was “one of the lads” in for robbery.

               Which leads us to the clergyman Jaime Sin in the Philippines who used to go to conferences with a name badge saying “Cardinal Sin”. He took all the teasing about his devilish name with good humour, and would welcome people with the words, “Welcome to the House of Sin.” His church was always packed.

                So let’s all be a bit more friendly and open and put on name badges at every opportunity.

                That doesn’t include you, Adolf.

What financial jargon really means

This financial prediction is guaranteed to be on target

By Nury Vittachi

*

Like many people, I have watched the world’s stock markets bounce up and down over the past few months. But unlike the rest of you I KNOW WHY.

                The answer was given to me by a financial analyst, a person who can best be described as “a man who carries a printout of a wobbly line”. He pointed to it. “You’ll notice that every few years, there’s a wobbly bit. Well, we’ve hit another wobbly bit.” (He gets paid the GDP of a small country for saying things like this.)

I showed him a prediction in the newspaper about Asian financial markets over the summer: “While we may see the markets advance, further corrections remain a real risk, as does the possibility of the indexes being trapped in a narrow trading range.”

                Hmm. “Advance” means climbs up, “correction” means falls down, and “narrow trading range” means stuck at one level. In other words, he is saying it may go up, it may go down, or it may stay the same.

                In OTHER other words, it is really saying, “I don’t have the foggiest idea what’s going on.”

Does this mean brokers are stupid? No, it means they are very clever. It means I am stupid because I nod admiringly while they are telling me they have no idea what is going on.

In one newspaper recently, an investment banker said: “The markets may recover, or it may be the end of the world.” That’s what is called “hedging bets”. He gets paid the GDP of a medium-sized country for saying things like that.

But I did learn one useful thing. Financial people are often highly creative individuals (I use the phrase in the journalistic sense of “crooks”). The many guides to new financial terminology on the market get thicker every year, as indeed, do sad people like me who attempt to read them.

But these books only tell you what financial people say – they don’t tell you what they mean. So here’s a guide to what bits of financial jargon actually mean.

Short-term buy: Probably a bad investment.

Medium-term buy: Definitely a bad investment.

Long-term buy: Definitely a really, really bad investment.

Ultra-long term buy: Guaranteed to make no money at all for at least seven generations or until the sun implodes, whichever takes longer.

Standard and Poor: A description of the typical investor.

Market Crash: A major price adjustment that the financial community arranges to happen the day after you put your savings into shares.

Cash Flow: Movement of money, which always happens in one direction: away from you and towards the brokers.

Institutional Investor: People who lose money in such vast quantities that they should really be locked up in institutions.

Bull Market: A normal part of the cycle which causes financial professionals to mistake themselves for geniuses.

                Correction: God having the last laugh on the people in the item above.

                Some people have found a way to guarantee they will not lose money in the financial markets. This cunning scheme is called “Not Having Any in the First Place” and is widely used by teachers, journalists, social workers, nurses, priests and so on.

                My financial analyst friend has more money than I do—but it comes with a new wobbly line chart. It’s his stress level, and I wouldn’t have it for all the tea in my grandmother.

C'mon baby light my fire

They got what they prayed for, plus a lawsuit

By Nury Vittachi
*

All over the world, highly trained newspaper columnists (“good-for-nothings”) spend long hours every day doing research, which is a combination of finely-honed skills: reading, making phone calls, staring into space, and drinking themselves into a stupor. They seek interesting, original “source material”, which is journalistic jargon for “something I can copy out so I can go home”.

But not this column. With its huge network of well-connected readers, this is a partnership, with each side having its own clearly defined function. You do the work. I get the money.

        Religious devotees were outraged when a businessman opened a bar right opposite their temple in a small town in India, I heard from reader Pola Singh.

           They were horrified at the idea of people gathering to drink and eat and sing and fall over in a place just a few meters away from a site where people did sacred, religious things, such as gathering to eat and drink and sing and fall over.

           So temple monks led the congregation in a campaign against it. They prayed. They beseeched their idols. They burned vast amounts of incense.

           Had the gods heard them? Apparently not. The grim day came when the bar was complete and almost ready to open for business.

That night, there was a huge storm. There was a bright flash. Lightning struck the bar and burned it to the ground.

           The following day, temple devotees, strolling to worship opposite a pile of ashes, were naturally rather smug. Until the bar owner filed a lawsuit suing the temple and the congregation for being “directly or indirectly responsible” for the destruction of his property.

           Temple leaders quickly denied that any of their actions had any connection whatsoever to the sudden and dramatic demise of the building opposite.

The argument ended up in court. The judge examining the case said: “I don’t know how I' m going to decide this case. But it appears from the paperwork, we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer, and we have an entire temple and its devotees who don't.”

           This story teaches us an important principle to live by. Be careful of what you wish for, as its previous owner may have a lawyer.

           A reader told me about one man who recently did receive what he wished for. A night-shift taxi driver named Shen was sitting in his car in Huainan, China, praying for a passenger at three o’clock in the morning.

           One appeared. “He had a lot of home appliances, so I helped him put all of his things into the cab,” Mr Shen later told the Xin’an Evening Post. “I noticed he had a fish without a tail, and I thought how much it looked like the fish in my freezer at home. But then I laughed at myself for even having the thought.” There are probably thousands of people who go out for a walk with a fish at 3 am in Huainan city.

           The taxi driver later returned home to find a burglar had broken into his house and helped himself to all the home appliances, plus the tail-less fish he’d saved for dinner. The well-organized villain had everything but a getaway car, which Mr Shen had thoughtfully provided.

           This leads us to a fascinating conclusion: I can now go home. 

Of dead chickens and strange diseases

The ten plagues of the age of irony are upon us

By Nury Vittachi

*

I was walking through a wet market with my children when we noticed something odd. One whole row of stalls had no customers except us. Even the stallholders seemed to have disappeared. It was the poultry section.

                Then I realized why. “It’s empty because bird flu germs were found at a market on the other side of town,” I told the kids. “Bird flu is a killer disease people catch from uncooked chickens.”

                “Will we die, daddy?”

                “No, dear,” I said, laughing. “Normal people over-react. But not smart people like us. We know germs cannot jump huge distances from a distant food market to our one here.”

                The next day I picked up the newspaper and discovered that germs had jumped from a distant food market to ours.

                I stuck the kids in the shower and washed them till they squeaked.

                Yet this whole bird flu thing bothers me. I find it really difficult to cower at the sight of chicken fillets, although I’ve seen crowds fleeing in terror from the sight of a dearly departed hen.

To me, dead chickens are the stuff of comedians’ valises. I have been known to carry around a rubber chicken myself, and many professional journalists consider it a standard item in their toolkit. How did they become the biggest threat to human life? It can only be clear proof of the existence of the Great Big Sense of Irony in the sky. The same could be said for HIV-AIDS and SARS.

I reckon the only possible explanation is that there must have been some big debate in the Plagues Department of heaven, some time in the 1980s.

                Angel One: I miss the old days, when we would regularly destroy the whole world with massive plagues.

Angel Two: There’s nothing to stop us doing some more. This is the age of irony. Let’s do some ironic plagues.

               Angel One: Great idea—let’s take something that everybody likes, and make it lethal.

                Angel Two: Blue skies? Hello Kitty? How about chocolate?

Angel One: Nah. Everybody already knows sunshine gives you skin cancer and candy is bad for you. How about sex? We could make sex lethal.

                And so HIV-AIDS was created. A few years later, the angels met to see how things had panned out on Earth.

                Angel One: That ironic plague certainly shook things up. Time for another. How about finding some really boring domestic animal and making it lethal?

                Angel Two: You mean like horses or dogs or something?

                Angel One: How about kittens?

                And so SARS was created, along with a rumour that it was carried by felines: thousands of kittens were abandoned across Asia.

                A few years later, the angels met again.

               Angel One: I’ve got an idea for the ultimate ironic plague. We’re going to take the least scary items in the world and make people petrified of them: chicken nuggets.

               And so was created bird flu.  At regular intervals, bird flu panic sweeps through Asia and chicken fast food shops lock their doors.

                Now according to my reading, plagues normally come in sets of ten, so there should be seven more. What’s next? I have no idea, but I’m kind of amused by the image of people backing away in horror whenever they see the Hello Kitty logo.

               Oh.
               You already do?

Facebook changes the way people relate

Poke me and I will friend you, he said

By Nury Vittachi

*

Millions of computer-users around the planet are now communicating with each other through Facebook, which is a sort of on-screen school year book with a page for every person on earth.

That’s fine. But what is not fine is that its bizarre language and conventions are starting to creep into real life. “I poked you. Will you friend me?” someone said to me the other day.

                This is worrying. Here’s how relationships in the future will develop as Facebook becomes increasingly influential.

                Boy meets girl. Boy pokes girl.“Ow! What did you do that for?” she complains.

                “It is how relationships start according to Facebook,” says the boy, whose name is Peter Lee. “Now you have to poke me back.”

                “What if I don’t want to?” says the girl, whose name is Meena Das.

                “If you do, you are allowed to look at my profile,” he replies.

                Curious, she stabs her finger into his shoulder. He immediately turns to stand at a right angle to her so she can see the side of his face. “You can now look at my profile.”

                “You’re weird.”

                “No. Poking is the first stage of a relationship. Studying a person’s profile is the second.”

                “And the third?”

                He pulls out two large pieces of blank white card from an art portfolio bag. “Stage three is to write on each other’s walls.”

                “Do we write poetry? Or do some sort of art?”

                Peter shakes his head. “Nah. We just write inane phrases or we forward ancient jokes.”

She watches to see if he writes anything clever or witty, but he just writes words she doesn’t understand: “Whassup? LOL.” 

               Then he walks purposefully across the road. She follows. They enter the offices of an outdoor advertising company. He leases electronic billboards on top of a building for them both.

“What are we doing this for?”

                “Stage four. Facebook requires us to have a public answer at all times for a question which is asked automatically: ‘What are you doing right now?’ The answer must be in the third person.” He types sentences which appear on the billboard above them: “Peter Lee is typing this sentence. Peter Lee feels the need to go to the toilet. Peter Lee is in the toilet.”

He goes to the toilet.

Two minutes later, he emerges to find that the girl is adjusting her make-up. He starts tapping on the keyboard that operates her electronic billboard. “Meena Das has updated her profile,” he writes.

Meena is impatient. “Can’t we do normal boy-girl stuff, like go on dates and stuff? You give me your phone number and I’ll give you mine.”

Peter shakes his head. “No. Guidelines recommend we don’t exchange personal details. It is not good to get too close to other users you meet through the Facebook friend system. Goodbye.”

She notices that he is walking away with his finger in front of him. “What are you doing?”

               “I am going to go and poke all your friends.”

                She’s outraged. “You can’t do that. They’re my friends.”

“Yes, I can. Now I’m in your network, your friends are my friends too.”

Meena stamps her foot. “Loads of shallow acquaintanceships and inane games, but no real relationships or commitment. This Facebook thing was started by boys, wasn’t it?” she says.

“Yes,” says Peter. “How did you guess?”

Feeding experiments to try on your kids

The Air Baby and other mysteries of dieting

By Nury Vittachi

*

Now here’s one of the great mysteries of modern life. All the westerners in my office keep in shape by cutting noodles and rice from their diets. All the Asians in my office keep in shape by doing exactly the opposite: eating nothing but noodles and rice. How come?

This observation proves one fact conclusively: I spend too much time watching other people in my office eating. It’s the curse of being on a diet.

Here’s another mystery. If you skip 10 desserts over 10 days, you lose one pound. But if you eat one dessert on the 11^th day, you immediately gain one pound. How does that work?

My wife has a penchant for molten chocolate cake, but no longer eats it. She just applies it to her hips.

If you are interested in nutrition, as I am, the most important thing, of course, is to have children. This is because you can use them for weird and bizarre experiments, a process known as “parenting”.

But at first, I couldn’t try out any feeding experiments on my youngest child, who turned out to be an Air Baby. Air Babies refuse to eat normally but extract nutrients from thin air, just like those hydroponic plants you get on tree branches in Sri Lanka. If we ever tried to get her to eat something, she would holler, aggrieved, “But I ate something last month.”

                We took her to a doctor.

               He said that there was a test to see if small children were thriving. He shook her chubby cheeks. “She’s fine,” he said. “At this age, they have an instinctual knowledge of what their bodies need—and it’s more trustworthy than what adults think they need.”

                So we stopped trying to make her eat normal meals and just put food on the table to see what she chose to eat.

              The first day, she ate only plain rice—three bowls of it—but no meat or vegetables. The second day she ate no rice or vegetables—but a whole steak, chopped into tiny bits.

                The third day she ate no rice or meat but no less than four large bowls of dau miu – a Chinese vegetable that’s a bit like spinach.

                We suddenly realized that she was in fact eating a healthy balanced diet, although stretched over a week instead of half an hour like the rest of us.

                This discovery led to me getting a reputation as The God of Parenting. This is how it happened. One Saturday, we invited three other families over for dinner. In the run-up to this, the Air Baby had lived on Ribena fumes on Wednesday, desserts on Thursday, and air on Friday.

As luck would have it, on the day we had guests, she was having a Vegetables Day.

The other parents watched astonished as this tiny child ignored the French fries on the table and just ate vast amounts of greens.

                “Wow! How did you train her to do that?” they asked, their eyes as green as the spinach.

                “Skilled parenting,” I lied.

                In the meantime, I have decided that the best diet advice ever comes from Miss Piggy of Sesame Street fame, who said: “Never eat anything at one sitting that you cannot lift.”

                I am heading to the gym to practice bench-pressing three-kilogram cheesecakes.

We just don't have the mindset

The rock festival tries to come to Asia

By Nury Vittachi

*

Consider the following offer. How would you like to pay a small fortune to sit in a muddy field for two days in damp weather, surrounded by intoxicated strangers, and deafened by a constant barrage of ear-splitting noise?

“Yes, yes, yes!” I hear you say. “Lead me thither.” Congratulations. You are a member of a select group of people known as “rock festival fans”, or, to use the scientific term, dangerously deranged masochists.

Many people just like you will shortly gather at the world’s most famous open-air music party, which starts this Friday at Glastonbury in Britain.
          I mentioned this at a lunch and was amazed when someone said Asia now has identical rock festivals.

Impossible! Abandoning all your inhibitions and rolling around naked in the mud, stoned out of your head—I know full well that that sort of behaviour is de rigueur for westerners from the Queen Mother to the Pope, but I couldn’t see Asians going for it.

So I tracked down people who had actually attended these so-called Asian rock festivals.

First, there’s the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan, which is supposedly an Asian copy of Glastonbury. Hah! In fact, it’s the opposite. Instead of reacting to songs with screaming and violent convulsions (“dancing”), people listen quietly and clap. There are no queues outside the beer tent—but massive ones to drop litter in the correct recycling bins. There’s a spa available in case anyone gets a tiny speck of dirt on them. If any member of the audience accidentally shows an emotion, he has to apologize and commit ritual suicide on stage with a hara-kiri sword.

Then there’s the Beijing Midi, the biggest rock festival in China. You know what decibel levels the bands at Midi reached this year? Zero. Just as organizers were starting to promote it, the authorities cancelled it, terrified that some rock star might publically say or think the word “Tibet”, and thus cause the total collapse of civilization as they know it.

The other music festivals in Asia are either tiny (a sprinkling of obscure bands in a park), or glossy commercial events for yuppies, too embarrassingly twee for true rock fans to be seen dead at.

No, the key element that defines a rock festival is the hippie mindset.

This year, for example, Glastonbury festival-goers have been told that they can only use tent pegs made of potato (this is not a joke), because metal tent pegs upset the cows who use the field the rest of the year. Festival goers won’t mind this. In 2005, the festival was cancelled completely, because the cows weren’t in the mood to vacate the premises (also not a joke).

I was about to conclude that Asia was rock-festival-free when someone told me about Bogra, an Islamic religious festival held in a town in the remote north of Bangladesh. It didn’t sound hopeful—till I heard the details.

Young people of both sexes camp in tents near the venue. They eat chicken curry and rice. They smoke cannabis to help them get into ecstatic states. (BBC journalist Alastair Lawson was told by a pilgrim: “Smoking cannabis is not wrong if it helps you to contemplate God.”)

Everybody stays up all night singing and dancing, and occasionally someone gets a bit overexcited and falls into the curry.

Now that’s a rock festival.

Judges need their beauty sleep

Kindly prove to the court you are alive, your honour

By Nury Vittachi

*

A dramatic controversy is raging in the corridors of international justice. We all know judge and jury have to be present at trials. But do they have to be paying attention? Do they have to be awake? And—here’s the cruncher—do they have to be alive?

These are important issues, particularly since many judges are, to use the recognized medical term, “drooling old codgers”.

                I was alerted to this topic by reader Harsha Wikramasinghe, who told me about a trial which has just been cancelled in Australia.  When the hearing started, court officials were delighted that jury members were taking copious notes. But then they noticed they were writing vertically. It turned out they’d lost interest in the case and had been doing Sudoku. The trial was abandoned.

                However, in a similar case in the same country, a different conclusion was reached. A Judge named Dodd fell asleep during the arguments, but woke up in time to sentence the men in the dock to prison sentences. The case continued, but the men afterwards complained that it was not their fault that their fates bored the judge.

                Senior judges considered the issues and concluded that the law required judges to be physically present—but they didn’t have to be mentally there. Legal expert Robert Moles summed up the finding as good news for judges: “They are entitled to some quality sleep time.”

                Some lawyers sneakily interrupt judges’ beauty sleep. In Ontario, Canada, Judge Ayres Cuoto fell asleep during a 2001 trial. Lawyer Kim Schofield found a copy of The Criminal Code, a 2,136-page hardback, and dropped it onto the desk. “His honour was visibly stirred from his slumber,” she said afterwards.

                In Asia, courts are sleepy places with occasionally bursts of drama for which we wake each other.  For example, there’s one case in my diaries which really should appear in any listing of the world’s most important criminal cases. A furious man stormed into a Sri Lanka court room holding a bag of excrement. He flung it at the judge. But he aimed too high. The substance hit the ceiling fan. You can imagine the mess. This defendant illustrated the truth in a widely used adage (“the s*** hit the fan”) that had surely never before been scientifically tested.

               But what about death? Having been a court reporter, I can testify many judges sit with their eyes closed, unbreathing, for hours on end. It is impossible to tell whether they are awake, asleep or deceased. I remember shaking hands with one judge and I’m sure I could feel rigor mortis in his arm.

               Although the Australian finding says judges are only required to be physically present, consider the incident that took place in the US city of Denver in July last year. Judge Frank G. Henderson died right there on his bench in the middle of a hearing. The case was halted. (I wonder how people left the room, since no one is allowed to stand up and leave before the judge does? Is everyone still there?)

                If they had followed the findings in the Australian case, lawyers could have just pointed out that Judge Henderson was still physically present, and carried on regardless. They would probably have enjoyed having fewer interruptions from the bench.

And the jury, of course, could have finished their Sudokus.

The Discovery of America

How settlers met the Redneck tribes

By Nury Vittachi

*

Today, boys and girls, we are going to study an important part of world history: the discovery of America.

                The first settlers from the civilized world, by which I mean Asia, of course, travelled to the Americas by ship, discovering it more than 150 years ago. They landed initially in what is now called North America in the mid-1800s. Here’s a poem to help you remember this: “In eighteen hundred and forty-two, Third Uncle sailed the ocean blue.”

                  Now when the Asian settlers landed, they discovered there were already people living there—a group of people known as the Rednecks.

                Although the Rednecks were simple, primitive people, they had spread over many parts of the country. They had curious habits. Female Rednecks had white faces on which they put face paint made for them by a man named Max Factor. Richer ones wore animal skins as a sign of wealth.

Males Rednecks had no face paint but gathered every night for the ritual drinking of a foul-tasting firewater called Budweiser that send them into ecstatic states during which they saw visions and fell over.

                It was observed that Rednecks greeted each other by raising their right hands and saying: “Whassup?” They had a deep spiritual connection with the land, which they referred to as “Real Estate”. They divided it into small sections which they sold them to each other for empty promises known as “mortgages”.

               The Asian settlers were intrigued by the fact that the land had great potential which was unlikely ever to be realized, since the inhabitants’ main hobby was collecting firearms and shooting each other. Occasionally, one of the Rednecks would suggest abandoning this practice, but the others would simply blast him full of holes.

                Furthermore, Rednecks spent millions building university libraries but never entered them, preferring to spend their study hours bowling.

               Not wanting to upset the natives, the Asian settlers started off in the railroad and mining businesses and then crept up the social ladder. The settlers’ children enrolled in Redneck universities, took over the libraries, and rose to dominate math, science, computing, medicine and so on. They became surgeons, financial controllers, systems analysts and programmers.

                Since many Asian settlers were math geeks, it was easy for them to go to Redneck casinos and wipe out the locals at blackjack and other card games.

Non-academic settlers discovered that the primitive peoples in North America had been subsisting since time immemorial only on inedible British-style food-like substances, such as “baked shoe leather” and “hot water bottle au gratin”.

So they introduced them to food which actually tasted of something. Rednecks were of course immediately enchanted with the stuff, and hundreds of thousands of outlets selling everything from curries to char siu opened up all over the New World.

These days, the Asians who discovered America live in peace with the remaining indigenous peoples there. Asians run the place, of course, but are wise enough to let the other tribes think that they are in charge.

The locals have not yet noticed that Asians have the best jobs earning the highest salaries in the key sectors, and label them as “inscrutable”, meaning “smarter than us”.

But today, it is considered politically incorrect for Asians in America to refer to the indigenous people of the country as Rednecks. They are now known as “staff”.

Running for your life

Jogging through the valley of the shadow of death

By Nury Vittachi
*

The world’s most invigorating exercise is jogging, but only in Asia. Going for a run anywhere else is pathetically dull: you pad along purpose-built waterside tracks with other yuppies like a herd of iPod-wearing sheep. I recently went jogging in Perth, Australia, and learned I could sleep at 10 kilometres an hour.

                But joggers in Asia never have a dull moment. You have to leap over massive holes. You have to maneuver around wild dogs. You have to sneak past wild people. And of course you have to negotiate normal Asian pavement traffic: pedestrians, scooters and 10-ton articulated trucks.

                My most memorable jogging experience was on a road near my home. This road was dug up so regularly that residents proposed changing the name from Victoria Road to Victoria Trench.

                That night, I took my youngest child with me. She sat in her stroller while I pounded the pavements, pushing from behind and feeling like SuperDad. She was so excited at the thought of an outing with me that she immediately fell asleep.

                Reaching the road, I was horrified to find workmen had dug up both pavements. They had also turned off the lampposts. And they had installed a contra-flow system, which is when temporary traffic lights force cars to take turns using a single lane.

                Contra-flow systems bring out the worst in drivers. Normally, when a traffic light turns red, a few drivers think: “I’ll speed through it as it’s only been red for a second or so.” But when a contra-flow system traffic light turns red, all drivers think: “I’ll speed through it as it’s only been red for a few minutes or so, probably.”

                The only way for us to continue on would have been a suicidal sprint down the middle of the road in pitch darkness with crazed drivers running red lights in both directions.

                So I was about to turn back when the man operating the temporary lights asked a favour of me. The walkie-talkies were broken, he said. Would I mind delivering a spare handset to the traffic light guy at the other end?

                Seeing that he had the ability to turn the lights to “stop” and ensure our safety, I agreed to make the delivery. He clicked a switch, the lights turned red, and I jogged off down the middle of the dark road, holding the equipment in one hand, and pushing the baby-stroller with the other. I felt even more like SuperDad. Here I was exercising, AND taking the baby out, AND doing my bit to keep the city’s arteries moving.

                But we were less than halfway down the road when I heard an ominous click. The idiot had turned the traffic lights green!

                Vast numbers of roaring vehicles charged through the darkness, heading straight for us. The pavements were fenced off. Suddenly I knew what a skittle in a bowling alley felt like.

                There was only one thing to do. Pray. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”

                The next couple of minutes were a blur as we dodged trucks, cars and buses and raced to safety. Miraculously, we survived.

                I delivered the equipment and got my breath back. The excitement had woken the baby up. “Again! Again!” she said.

                Next day I joined a gym.

Car park nazis I have known

Motorists are at war, you know
By Nury Vittachi

*

My wife got a parking fine the other day. Yet she had parked within the white lines, heaped money into the meter, and returned well before expiry time. What was the deal?

It turned out that parking spaces on that street had been designated as “vans and trucks only” and those on the next street “cars only”. However, the owners of the parking spaces had made sure there was no visible information about this.

For years there have been running battles between people with cars and people with parking spaces. I stopped at one parking garage recently which displayed a big sign at the entrance: “ONLY $6.” I nipped in and stayed just a few minutes. On the way out, officials demanded $24.

“But the sign said six dollars,” I complained.

“Six dollars for 15 minutes,” the official said. “Minimum stay one hour.”

A week later, officials put up a large disclaimer on the car park wall: “The owners of this car park take no liability whatsoever for any theft or damage or any other occurrence concerning your car, whether caused by directly or indirectly by us.”

If you think about it, this disclaimer actually gives car park staff full permission to break into your car, steal your stereo, and leave notes sneering at your taste in music. Knowing the officials who work there, it’s probably only a matter of time before they do. (I just hope they take my wife’s Carly Simon CDs.)

I saw one disclaimer that was even worse. In the car park at Mughal Gardens, Srinigar, India, there’s an extra line: “No Responsibility for Explosions.” So they can blow up your car if they feel like.

The following week, officials at my local car park added three new layers of control. A computer records the time you enter. An automatic camera takes a time-stamped picture of your car on the way in. And a little man in a uniform writes down your number plate and arrival time in a log book.

After lunch one day, I went to pick up my car and discovered, to my horror, that I had lost my entry ticket.

The car park official was thrilled. “You lost ticket, you pay 24 hours’ parking fee,” he grinned.

I explained that I had only been there an hour.

“You got no proof,” he said.

“True,” I said. “But you do. You have a computer record. AND you have a photo record. AND you have a Logbook Kept by a Little Man in a Uniform record.”

He looked horrified. It was true. There was now a mountain of evidence protecting the driver.

He went into a huddle with other officials. They eventually decided that instead of asking for the cost of 24 hours’ parking, they would demand the same money but call it a “Lost Ticket Handling Charge”.

So I had to pay it. But it was almost worth it just to have tormented them for a few minutes.

I heard of a case in London recently in which a driver returned to his parked car to find that officials had painted a white “Disabled Parking Only” box on the ground around the vehicle, and then attached a parking fine to his windscreen.

Which is why I now carry grey paint in the boot of my car.

This is war, you know. 

There's rain, and there's rain in Asia

Asia is the only place where you actually get weather

By Nury Vittachi
*

“Don’t go out,” she warned. “It’s raining.” I was standing in the doorway of a house in London, about to step outside.

I turned and shook my head. “This,” I said, gesturing outside, “is not rain.”

Honestly: Europeans are SO delicate! In that region, they define as “a rainy day” what we in Asia would call “mild humidity”. What they define as “a major rainstorm” is an almost imperceptible mist of water vapour, a bit like the weather angel is sitting on the edge of her cloud squirting an Evian atomizer.

Yet the slightest dampness causes Europeans to barricade themselves in their houses and phone flood control. If a drop of water hits the head of a European woman, she is taken to hospital to have it extracted. In England, the law requires that everyone carries an umbrella with them at all times, even while swimming. In cartoons, British monarchs may wear crowns and ermine robes, but the Queen’s actual ceremonial outfit is a headscarf, raincoat and rubber boots.

Yet the weather in Europe is so mild that we in Asia wouldn’t even count it as weather. It’s just sort of nothing.

Europeans: Want to see what real rain is like? Come to Asia.

They think the UK is a rainy place, but the average rainfall there is a mere 60 millimetres a month. Compare that to the last big rainfall in Mumbai, which was 1,000 millimetres in a single day.

On a rainy weekend in Hong Kong earlier this month, fish could be seen swimming down a high street. You know that scene in The Little Mermaid where Ariel sits in her den at the bottom of the sea and wonders what life is like on land? Well, the silly girl could just get off her scaly butt and swim to Asia and wait for a decent rainstorm. She could easily swim down the main road, get some sightseeing done, do a bit of shopping, and she wouldn’t even have to get her tail dry.

When I was a young reporter I recall writing a story about a truck in Bangladesh which was in collision with a large fish. The truck was wrecked and the fish was not too happy either. This rarely happens in Pall Mall.

I also recall writing about a woman in India where the rain turned into a flood, as it often does, so she climbed into a tree to finish what she was doing—having a baby. Now that is what I call “natural birth”.

In Europe, after what passes for a rainstorm, pedestrians have to negotiate a slight dampness on the pavements. After a rainstorm in Asia, we have to get on to Google Earth and redraw the borders on our maps.

Personally, I love weather, especially the big stuff. I feel compelled to go outdoors whenever a typhoon or rainstorm hits town. My doctor says this is because I suffer from a rare medical condition known as “idiocy”.

I once went out during a major typhoon near my home with a visitor from Europe. At first, he was scathing about how undramatic it was. Then we walked around a corner and were instantly hit by a body of water approximately the size and shape of an Olympic swimming pool.

               Now that’s rain.

We all work in sick buildings

Ice, fire and other hazards of modern office life

By Nury Vittachi

*

Like many readers, I work in an office complex. This cluster of buildings is designed to serve 12,000 people. But I’m writing this all alone.

It’s a public holiday and everyone else is off work. But not me. No sir: how could the world cope without essential services such as medical care, air traffic control, law enforcement, and the provision of newspaper columns? (Don’t answer that.)

To save money on this low-traffic day, the building managers have taped a sign to the elevator: “Please consider using the stairs. You can Save Energy and Get Exercise.” Just in case I am not deeply moved by their rare use of the word “please”, they have thoughtfully turned the lift off to help me with my decision.

After puffing up the stairs to my office, I discover the air -conditioning has also been turned off and the room resembles the core of the sun, only 432 degrees hotter.

Actually, I don’t mind this. As a Sri Lankan, I am only happy when I am too hot.

I slave away on the paragraphs above until noon, and then go foraging for food.

Uh-oh. I quickly discover that every restaurant is closed. This is bad news. It means I have to get lunch from a convenience store. Convenience stores, for readers fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with them, are brightly lit hellholes selling food-like items at exorbitant prices to desperate, unwary people.

Unwisely, I purchase a food-like item and find there is no cooking time printed on it. Instead, it says: “Place in store microwave and press button eight.” This is because anyone idiotic enough to eat convenience store food is assumed, correctly, to lack the brainpower to be able to understand complex concepts such as the fact that “two minutes” means two of those minute things.

After two minutes, the oven beeps. I open the door and note that a blob of radioactive orange sauce has bubbled out from the container. I grab a tissue to try to mop it up.

This is a mistake because the orange liquid is 4,000 degrees Celcius. I end up screaming and leaping around the store with my fingers in my mouth, mumbling, “It’s all right, it’s all right,” a phrase which embarrassed, well-brought-up middle-class people say when they are not all right.

Shop staff, experienced at dealing with emergencies involving hazardous chemicals, wave me aside and don nuclear radiation suits to deal with the spill.

The leaky microwaved lunch box is placed in a plastic bag and handed to me. I take it back to my office/ sauna, where it raises the temperature from that of the sun to that of an exploding supernova. My plywood desk goes soft and all liquids, including my tears, evaporate instantly.

I strip to my boxer shorts to avoid heatstroke. At this point, the patrolling security guard peers through my office window and nods his head knowingly.

Why do I put up with these working conditions? I’ll tell you. Like virtually all other offices in big cities in Asia, my air-conditioning system has only two settings: “off” and “flash freeze”. I spend most of the week in freezing, sub-arctic conditions, rather like one of those cavemen they find in glaciers.

I have to work holidays and weekends to thaw out.

Products of the supreme leader factory

In Asia, anyone can be leader, especially mannequins

By Nury Vittachi
*

I was standing by a news-stand which sells a range of Asian papers when I noticed almost all of them had glowing articles about Obama Bin Laden, who is now applying for the job of US president. Cheeky man!

The odd thing was that there were positive articles about this even in militant newspapers with a policy of never printing the word “America” without the prefix “evil aggressor”. They do this so religiously that their younger readers think the phrase is part of the country’s name, as in: “The nations of the world include Great Britain, the Virgin Islands and the United Evil Aggressors of America.”

Why do people on this side of the planet like Mr Obama? Well, the obvious reason is that he’s Asian. Now I know that technically he’s not, but spiritually he is. He has an Asian name, he has black hair, he has dark brown eyes, and—this is the clincher—he likes to eat chilli so hot it has to be served in lead-lined bowls by aides in radiation suits.

According to the infallible Asian science of feng shui, Mr Obama is guaranteed to win the US election. (The hair parting of his rival John McCain points southwest, poor fella.)

His presence in the world’s top job will go a small way towards making America marginally cool, after a long history of being uncool. You see, only the funkiest, most sophisticated places in the world can elect folk destined by the gods to be spat upon (minorities, women, foreigners, tourists).

This region is totally cool. The first place in the world to elect a female prime minister was Asia (Sri Lanka in 1960). Even Muslim Bangladesh followed with several female premiers, as have other Asian nations.

In Asia, we even find a rare example of one race being peacefully governed by a tiny group from another race: Hong Kong from 1841 to 1997. (Try to imagine a small group of Frenchmen taking over Britain. There would be riots within the hour.)

India elects any one who asks nicely. Winners include women (such as Indira Gandhi), Sikhs (Manmohan Singh), bearded men (Inder Kumar Gujral), clean shaven ones (Atal Bihari Vajpayee) and even a female European tourist: Sonia Gandhi. It’s not just civic leaders either. Last week, an Indian business school elected a monkey statue as president.

Asia has variety. North Korea once elected a rotting corpse for Supreme Leader and currently has a leader with all the appeal of a rotting corpse.

In fact, I think there’s only one major country in Asia which remains totally predictable in the election stakes. Clearly there is a secret rule which says the leader of China MUST be male, stocky, boring, elderly, bespectacled, and have the charisma of a lettuce.

In fact, most of China’s top people are so alike that I suspect they are churned out in large numbers from a mannequin factory in Beijing called Elderly Leader Factory Number One.

For China to change, it would have to elect—oops, sorry, no democracy—it would have to assign the job of premier to someone who is the categorical opposite of the standard leader. They would need a person who is not bespectacled, not dark-haired, not Chinese, not stocky and not male.

I hear Hillary Clinton is looking for work.

Bureaucratic nightmares round-up

Airport officials recapture the red tape top spot
By Nury Vittachi

*

Here at the records office of the Ministry of Unreasonable Officials we are happy to announce that employees in the airport sector have once again grabbed the coveted top spot.   

This follows a period when civil servants threatened to take over as dumbest breed of red tape dispensers, thanks to officials from India and Malaysia who declared living people dead and refused to revise their paperwork despite having the “corpses” standing in from of them asking politely for their status as deceased persons to be reviewed.

The airline sector’s winning team earlier this month prevented a man from boarding a plane at Heathrow airport in London because he was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a man with a gun. Brad Jayakody’s garment had an image from the action film Transformers. Well done, Heathrow officials: that was an impressive entry.

In runner-up position came an Indian airport official. He confiscated a mango from a passenger “for security reasons” before allowing him to board a domestic flight in that country. The passenger told me: “Maybe they thought I would hijack the plane by threatening to squish it on the pilot’s nice uniform?”

Numerous people shared stories of airport security officials swooping on women for the crime of wearing underwired bras. Just a little note to guards: if a woman needs tempered steel to reinforce the underside of her brassiere, there is unlikely to be much room in the garment for extraneous objects.

And in the United States, airport officials prevented a person boarding an aircraft with a MacBook Air, the new super-thin computer from Apple. They didn’t believe such a slim object could be a real computer. 

                An emailer who signs himself “Frequent Traveler” asked a question: “Many airports now have No Joking signs at security areas, and there have been several cases of quick-witted wags who have been arrested and even jailed for telling jokes. How do they square this with their constitutions, which guarantee free speech? And why haven’t you been arrested?”

The only answer to your first question, Frequent Traveller, is a hollow laugh.

As for the second, I pretend to be deaf and dumb.

As well as