The Old Monk Index

Rum comes in different flavors and colors, from white to spiced. But none of them can match the legendary status of Old Monk in India. It’s the drink of choice for many of us who grew up mixing it with coke, and we have our own preferences for how strong or sweet we like it. Just like wine lovers care about the texture of their drink, we care about our Old Monk. And one of the best things about it is how cheap it is. I once made the mistake of buying an Old Monk in the USA, where it cost me a whopping $20 (~ ₹ 1600 ) for a bottle, which would normally cost me between ₹250 -400 back home. It’s so cheap that I now adjudge the quality of a bar based on how it prices the Old Monk on the menu.

Rum is a bargain compared to other drinks in India (I’m not talking about pheni and such :p). When people are still exploring the world of booze, and have a tight budget to indulge their cravings, rum is a lifesaver. I can’t forget how I always ordered Old Monk from the MyBar menu whenever I went out with my buddies for a bash in college. It was only ₹70-80 for a 30 ml shot, and now it’s ₹125. Even with the inflation over the last 8 years, Old Monk remains the cheapest option on the bar menu, but not the least popular. 😊

To illustrate how I use Old Monk as a gauge of how upscale a bar is, let me give you some examples. If I consider MyBar as the lowest of the low in terms of pricing, then any restaurant that charges more than that would be a step above MyBar. To support this further, here is another case. Even though I graduated from college a long time ago, I still like to save money on my booze when I drink outside. So, once in a while, I go to a restaurant called Café Sandoz in Delhi, which is right next to the entrance of IIT Delhi. Sandoz sells Old Monk 30 ml for ₹140, which is not too bad. On the contrary, slightly fancier places near Connaught Place in Delhi offer Old Monk for ₹200-250, a hike of ~60-100% over the cheaper place. But there is another thing, many of the bars near Khan Market, which is a much more posh area than CP, also have Old Monk in the same price range. In fact, Anglow, a restaurant/ bar in Khan market charges ₹215 for Old Monk, while giving a huge improvement in terms of atmosphere. One could infer that for the middle to upper-middle range of bars, the Old Monk index does not match the other items on the menu, thus, giving broke students a chance to enjoy a better experience, as long as they fill up on the ‘Chakhna’ before entering the bar.

How about the high-end category?

Well, hotels like Hyatt and Taj might not even have the Old Monk, and lure you with some other choices. But rum is rum, and therefore, high-end pricing of rum at these places is only reasonable because you are there. The prices at such places can vary from ₹300 – 750, with markups ranging from over 140 – 500% over the cheaper options. Unfortunately, no experience advantage for broke college students here, unless you are relying on the restaurants to fill you up with buns, bread sticks, and baguettes, which makes you overjoyed when you find out they are actually ‘free of charge’.

In conclusion, Old Monk is more than just a rum. It is a cultural icon, a symbol of nostalgia, and a measure of affordability. It has a loyal fan base that spans generations and regions, and it offers a unique experience that no other drink can match. Whether you are a college student, a working professional, or a retired person, you can always enjoy a glass of Old Monk with coke, and feel the warmth and happiness that it brings. Old Monk is not just a drink, it is a way of life.

How Long is Too Long?

As I scrape through my job, nearing the 4th anniversary at the office, wherein barring the janitor, nearly everyone has come and gone, I sit and wonder, what am I doing here?

It’s often said that a few idiosyncratic things about an office and its work are best known to those who’ve spent some time there. As true as it may be, familiarity with the job itself is great, but familiarity with the office to the extent that you know the shades of paint underneath the latest coat, as it chips away, is something to be concerned about.

You might realise that you no more look like the person on your employee ID, and certainly don’t exude a level of enthusiasm that your ear-to-ear smile in the ID lets on. Pinned-up snippets at your desk from yesteryears have turned yellow, and the file cabinet has swelled up with things you don’t remember putting. You find yourself fraternising a lot more with people you once detested, reminiscing together about the time gone by, and despite being young, crib like a cane-wielding old man who hasn’t been served his morning tea.

While the steady stream of new employees puts you to shame with their knowledge and skills, you make them bow before you when it comes to managing banal tasks such as filing for reimbursements. You are a wiz who might forget the day of the week but knows expense codes for lunches like the back of his hand.

You are a loyal employee, more than a number, one whose love for the place runs deeper than the crater the body has left on the chair you sit on. An employee who can’t be moved, an unwitting participant in the menacing ways of the office, who breathes in its life and might just sit on its ruins.

That Ever Receding Hairline

As per a survey, by the age of 21, nearly 25% of men would have experienced some degree of hair loss. This figure increases to 66% for folks 35 years or older. This stage is also the inflexion point where hair oil meets hair serum, and a baseball cap meets the house keys on the key holder; If you are nearing baldness, It could also mean you meet an empty chair on the other side of the table on a blind date :p

However, being bald does not mean you have to be utterly conscious of yourself. You can be just as insecure about your looks, height, weight, and plethora of other things you want to get jittery about. Who is to say that warding off insecurity over one thing wouldn’t contribute to insecurity over something else. Judging by the race to space, which is nothing but a vanity race and has many billionaires up all night these days, you’d probably lose those hair anyway by the time you get up in space, unless you make liberal use of that money for a hair transplant like Elon has.

Anyway, my larger argument here is that in a world that has become more accepting of people and their identities, we need modern sensibilities around baldness as well. I mean, why are bald babies deemed cute but bald guys, not so much?

Not to trivialize the efforts of many communities in their legitimate struggle to gain acceptability or to in anyway connote that the challenges faced by the bald community are at par with these other groups, but shouldn’t there be a pride parade for bald folks as well? Wouldn’t it be great if folks who have had to manage the entire year with precariously placed toupees get to roam the streets with their well oiled egg heads for once with pride?

Not everyone is a Jason Statham or a Timothy Olyphant, as seen on Hitman. Not everyone has that jawline, or that accent. Do you think a pudgy guy teased by a few women for his looks would shrug off the put down with a “A word of advice, girls. If you’re picking the wrong fight at least pick the right weapon”? No. The guy would melt, it’s just human. The world is full of Kevin Malones, which is great. But Kevin doesn’t get Pam, Jim Halpert does. But on a side note, judging by stats, there is a 50% chance that even Jim Halpert would have gone bald before he turned 49.

So, let’s strive to make this world a bald friendly world.

Do’s and Don’ts for a Virtual Meeting

Earlier this year, the events platform, ClickMeeting, posted a report on the number of online events hosted over its platform. As against 60k events hosted in March 2019, the platform witnessed a 5x jump to nearly 300k events in March 2020. While not reflective of the global numbers associated with webinars, it is indicative of the pivot towards online meetings and events due to COVID-19. My tally on the number of events I have participated in runs high as well, albeit, the mental trauma suffered attending them can’t be quantified. While writing up the new year resolution earlier in the year, I certainly didn’t have a column on ‘I will attend X number of Webinars/Y number of Zoom Calls’. But if I had, that would probably be the only thing I would come close to achieving this year.

Being an online employee is a new role many of us are adjusting to, and it certainly isn’t easy. From a daily morning scrum meeting, or as one would call it, a ‘wake-up muster’, to one on one sessions for tasks that during pre-COVID were settled at the water cooler, online meetings have themselves become a pandemic. Thus, meeting etiquettes too are becoming a brunt imposed upon by organizations. However, they are sometimes well-intentioned and act as a “How to Guide” on avoiding social faux pas, and in many cases, can be the clincher towards remaining employed.

As the genre of video conferences bloopers blooms in this pandemic, it has in its kitty a set of gaffes that are endearing and horrifying, and sometimes both at the same time. An amusing prelude to the series of bloopers witnessed over video conferences these days was a famous interview featuring a professor based out of South Korea, Prof. Robert Kelley. During his interview with BBC in 2017 over webcam, his young daughter unwittingly walked into his room, and was closely followed by her toddler brother. As the professor struggled to retain composure, his wife came to his rescue. This gaffe, which induced light hearted laughter amongst the viewers, made the family social media stars overnight. The interview has drawn more than 44 million views till date, and earned the family invites from famous talk show hosts such as Ellen DeGeneres. Now, such content is part of the mainstream. However, not every person is as lucky or finds himself/herself in a situation that has acceptable social currency. For instance, Jeffrey Toobin, a veteran writer with the New Yorker was fired from his job earlier this month, when he started to masturbate while on a zoom call with his colleagues. In his defence, he did not know the camera was on. With this misdemeanor, Mr Toobin shall soon find himself as a caricature placed in the same genre as his book, ” True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump.” While, not everyone needs to exercise caution in view of such instances, as very few are bold enough to mix business with such pleasure, it is important to know that the lines between the two can blur if they are only a tab apart on the laptop.

Prof. Robert Kelley (Expert on South Korean Politics & Acclaimed Work From Home Professional)

While internet is replete with do’s and don’ts for virtual meetings, here are a few notable and practical ones that you may employ:-

1. Dress Up Well:
   • Blazers are in vogue, while pants are hanging themselves by the hangars in desperation. If you don’t want yourself up as a tile on the screen, blame the internet bandwidth and switch off video
2. Customary Book Shelf:
   • It doesn’t matter if the last thing you read was an in-flight brochure on a United before the pandemic, do keep a decent sized bookshelf handy to be used as a backdrop. Your exquisite tastes in books may bump your chances for a promotion or earn you plenty of admiration, even if in reality you get by just fine with an Archie. On another note, is there a Shazam type app to identify book titles in a speaker’s background over video calls? Please let me know
3. Don’t be in one, if possible
   • “Studies have found that people who attended less than 3 video conferences in a week were likely to live 5 years or more than those who didn’t”
   • Just kidding!! No such study has been commissioned, at least, not yet. But I don’t think you would need a peer reviewed study to change your opinion about these things. After all, eternal peace comes to those who RSVP ‘decline’

Why Sitcoms Aren’t Just Shows

In the age of Netflix and Amazon, where content is consumed like morning coffee, a ritual so ensnaring one can’t imagine a life without it, SitComs or Situational Comedy shows have become an essential part as well. If there were ever a to-do list of life, fashioned after an adrenaline rush post reading an influencer’s Instagram story tagged #YOLO, one would seldom try to sneak in a good old comedy beneath a pile of near impossible goals.

You see yourselves in the character!

After recently having re-watched ‘How I Met Your Mother’ for the nth time, I found myself listening to what was a podcast featuring the writers and stars from the show. Josh Radnor, who played its lead character, Ted, remarked that after a point in time the “Show ceases to be yours, and it becomes the fans’. Ownership of the show is with them. ” (somebody needs to tell this to J K Rowling )

That is absolutely true. People tend to resonate with the shows and relate to them in their own ways. You feel a real sense of ownership with things you watch on that idiot box, mobile, et al . The plots unravel in ways that bring to fore emotions you never knew existed; you don’t have to have had a breakup to feel for the hopeless romantic in Ted, you might just need to have had those moments of vulnerability when you felt raw.

Still from ‘How I Met Your Mother’ ; Source: Hollywood.com

One notable mention to this effect for me was a particular scene from the episode ‘Time Traveler’s ‘ in season 8 of HIMYM, when Ted is sitting alone at a bar, staring at the ticket to an event he had initially planned to go to with his friends, who are now too busy with their lives to come along. As Ted rues over his loneliness, he imagines himself sitting with another lead character on the show, Barney, along with the future and past versions of himself and Barney’s that emerge out of nowhere like djinns. In this otherwise seemingly comical scene, it is Barney who wants Ted to come along to watch Robots vs Wrestlers, and an unwilling Ted feigns an obdurate look to show his displeasure. As they then sit to discuss scenarios to what might transpire if he does take Barney up on his invitation, imaginary Barney leads him to the reality by saying that he is merely a figment of Ted’s own imagination, and his comments are merely borne out of Ted’s own desire to go to the match. In his loneliness, this mirage of being cajoled by a friend to come along seems to be the more comforting lie since the reality, as imaginary Barney puts it is, “Look around Ted, you are all alone.”

They make you happy

Within the realm of an idealistic life of a sitcom, where weirdly grown adults are either seen sitting in a coffee shop or a bar all the time, and adult responsibilities seem to take care of themselves, there are moments of joy that uplift your mood. After all, you don’t consume such content to run you through the indelicate travesties of life, rather look to soothe the pains of life with these cheap thrills or joys.

There are endless moments of silliness, sophistry, outright juvenile behaviour and failed attempts at adulting that makes these shows funny, relatable and topical through the ages. Seinfeld, a sitcom that ran from 1989 to 1999 will still make you cry out of laughter, and will continue to draw an audience even if Netflix/prime doesn’t nudge it to your home page every now and then. No wonder Netflix paid $500 million in 2019 to acquire the rights to screen Seinfeld on its platform.

While there are plethora of funny moments to run through, I will leave you here on this post with one scene from Seinfeld, which is not only hillarious but instructive and worth trying out.

Logout

Waking up to the piercing sound of the alarm clock early in the morning, rushing through a breakfast of soggy cereals gulped along with a glass of juice, and then spending forty minutes of the cab ride balancing the laptop on legs that are forced together were my routine that I had once begrudgingly adopted, and one that I somehow now miss. COVID-19 has created upheaval of a different magnitude the world over, not only bringing loss of life in its wake, but also uprooting the livelihood of many. So, my routine not having stood the test of time in backdrop of once in a century occurrence of a pandemic is hardly something that should evoke concern or merit attention. But, the new normal of ‘Work from Home’ and a life in isolation is another pandemic, which while genial in its concern for the human anatomy, is fairly hostile towards the human mind.

I am concerned about the shrinking distance between home and the workplace; once a few kilometers away, it now precariously stands a chair away, which finds itself wedged in the narrow space between the table and the desk in my room. Seldom, the workplace crawls next to me on the bed, and interrupts my evening marathons watching Netflix, since who cares about privacy anyway. The notification tab on the laptop is an incessant pop, sometimes finding itself play such beats that would put many YouTube popstars to shame. And, yes, now let’s address the elephant in the room. As the lockdown completes over 8 months, the adage, “Well, this could have been an e-mail” has caught on. However, having been subjected to ridiculous e-mails that are akin to a boss asking, “Hey, could you pick up that glass and bring it near my mouth”, I would go a step further and say, “Hey, this shouldn’t have been an email at all”. Why delegate nonsensical banal tasks to employees just because you are too busy to open up your laptop, or in some cases, unwilling to switch tabs and search on google. This level of delegation or outsourcing should raise eyebrows, or in the pandemic age, earn people a ‘rolling eye’ emoji on MS Teams.

The fact that this a white-collar grouse isn’t lost on me. I do understand that there are so many jobs out there that require people to risk their lives everyday. So, I should reconcile with my fate and just be happy. I should also perhaps draw comfort in the fact that freedom from a miserable job can just be a ‘Logout’ away.

Rest in Peace

Today I lost someone really close to my heart, someone whom I looked upto and had shared great memories with during my childhood. Though he was just another officer among the many in my Dad’s Unit, he was like a family member to us. As he is now gone, I wish to pay him a tribute by means of this letter. So here it goes:

Dearest Gautam Uncle,

I can’t tell you to how cheated I feel, for destiny has cheated me of your blessings and your company. When I heard the news today morning, I was misled into believing that you had just met with an accident and were hospitalized, leaving a shred of hope for me to pray for your recovery. What I wasn’t told was that you had left us the very minute of that accident, and had attained the heavenly abode . I don’t blame Dad for keeping the news from me, as I know he was just trying to protect me. He knew how closely knit we were as a family and that the news would break me. As a matter of fact, it actually did. Since morning, my laptop screen is stuck to your facebook page, which has messages from loved ones pouring in. I somehow didn’t have the courage to put in a few words myself, so I just stared on. I can’t think about what Aunty and your sweet little daughters must be going through, but I know this that your family is my family, so you shan’t worry.

It’s the part of being in the Army fraternity which makes you complacent towards death. It is like staring at death so often that you get quite bored of it after a point of time. But you fail to account for the fact, that when death actually strikes your loved ones, what would you do. I have never lost someone so close to me as you were. Hence, I am a little sad, a little heartbroken. It is hard digesting the fact that someone you knew so well, and met so often shall not be there for the remainder of your life. You will never hear their voice again, nor will you ever see them again. I flinch at the thought of what the ‘ Unit Get Togethers’ would look like without you quipping in , or how our family trips would be like without you being there.

You were always my favourite in the Unit and you were my go to guy for all the ‘masti’ in the boring Unit parties in Ranchi. As I grew up a little, and you grew older, you were still my favourite. When we were in Hyderabad, you were still as crazy as ever, inspite of becoming a proud father and having more responsibilities. I knew that my weekends would always involve chilling out at your place, and somehow that made me really look forward to them. For the voracious eaters we were, you were my source of all the different non-veg cuisines around in Hyderabad. From being driven around in your car to bouncing around at the Unit’s Basketball court with you, I have one to many memories with you which I can never forget. Now, I am 21 years old, still struck by the magnificence of the Colonel who was an ace at Golf, and could beat anyone down in a game on one-on-one at basketball. Words can’t describe to how terribly I will miss you, but then to what we have been taught by you and the likes of you, Soldiers and their families must learn to move on.

RIP Colonel Yogesh Kumar Gautam,

3rd Batallion the Bihar Regiment,

Indian Army

Died in Jammu & Kashmir

Rolling them Models

As a kid, I had several role models, ranging from the most suave rock-stars to superheroes from the movies. In fact, a few of them were a creation of my imaginative mind, which always placed me in the shoes of men in capes. It was exciting to dwell in such fantasies and let my grey cells galore gallop away to the most incredible imagery one could possibly form, wherein every outcome of blithe transgressions were not only favourable, but were symbolic of my unique virtues (atleast as to my mind). Though, a seasoned vigilante in my dreams and a struggling student in reality, my thick glasses didn’t do me justice as much as they did to Clark Kent. I remained a mortal nobody with or without glasses.

Through the course of my childhood, as my ambitions changed, the posters on my bedroom walls fell victims. Even the shelves in my room were overwhelmed with different genre of books that placed themselves neatly over the slabs, aggregating to a picture of a clueless mind towards the end of my teens. Now, when many around me partake to the cubical life, I sit here, still clueless, admiring the beauty of the titles , which have now grown comfortable with each other. Each title is a part of me, and somewhere in my mind, it gleams in the deepest corners allowing me to be a generalist in my virtues and exhibit loads of other non-essential qualities.

As every role model has come and gone, I haven’t been  able to emotionally detach myself from all of them. In their most vulnerable times, I find myself weakened. I can’t count to how many times a final’s defeat or a serve that went wrong has brought me down to the floor ,when Roger Federer would be playing. Every time a soldier dies in the line of duty, showing exemplary courage and valor, I get distraught. I find strength from such characters, and to see them vulnerable is like seeing myself vulnerable, and this isn’t a feeling I cherish.

From the schools of Idealism, a contemporary note says  , ”

Believe in all bullshit for truth is none, skepticism is all around you, choose the best one.

Role models bring in their own set of ideals and virtues, and like a book, you need to read them to know them. If you find the right one, stick with them for they can really help you do things you didn’t think you were capable of. If not, then you are most welcome to share my bookshelf.