There’s one piece of Marathi slang or colloquial joke that youngsters in Pune use which I find invariably funny: ‘wel zaat nahi’ they say, laconically, when they want to say that someone has nothing better to do and is wasting time on some silly matter.
Well, chaps (joined by chapettes too) who go around making such a big fat hoo-ha every year out of valentine’s day, and how it is ruining our fiuu-thousand-year-old tradition are surely in the category of wel zaat nahi public.
But hello, surely their free-floating ire, which seems to have run out of targets, can be harnessed and redirected elsewhere? For instance, top-cop Julio Rebeiro had in the nineties asked them to step forward like real sher-ke-bachhe and get sent to Kargil. He was met with a deafening silence, apparently, and some of them told him they couldn’t go as Valentine’s day was approaching, and therefore a much more important war had to be fought and what was he thinking, sending these boys to remote places like Kargil when the enemy was right in our midst, and so on and so patriotically forth.
Apparently so dire is the need to while away time on petty matters (or, itka wel zaat nahi) that they now gatecrash parties, tear women’s clothes, and even video tape their victories – I’m guessing to go show it to the higher up (whose wel zaat nahi too, looks like). While the general public is now irritated and outraged at these delinquents, a worse thing has happened. People are now sniggering at them, and that snigger is turning into a nation-wide belly-laugh at the absurdity of it all. And what worse criticism can there be than being mercilessly laughed at. Even worse than being mercilessly beaten up.
But to come back to providing an agenda for our local Pune wel zaat nahis. First, a few questions. How come we never hear of you rioting, beating up, threatening and stripping culprits when our city is shaken by horrible eve-teasing incidents, rapes of women and minors, daylight robbing of people right outside Shivajinagar Station, murders of elders, and hit-and-run accidents? Where exactly are you at these times? And do these not constitute an outrage on our fiuu-thousand-year-old tradition? Haan? How come you don’t feel like disfiguring the obscenely huge hoardings of a builder who is under a cloud for the collapse of a balcony and the death of a kid? How come, in your bid to spend your time fruitfully, since wel zaat nahi, you feel more outraged by a shop front with its name not in Devanagri and rush off to the spot to mete out justice with your stone-throwing-kit? How come we never hear you shocked and outraged at massive shirish trees amputated and then uprooted?
Actually why ask you guys these questions. You and your ilk across the world are the same. Ready to riot and burn and kill on issues that matter not a jot to your day-to-day lives, actually. And quite happy to look the other way when real people with genuine life problems could do with some of your fervour and so-called righteousness. What you choose to be outraged about and hurts your ‘sentiments’ is indeed telling of where your heart and brain resides.
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And on to more laughing matters. And some more questions. The findings of that Forbes study. Oh what a riot (laugh riot). Some of us are still prone to huge guffawing fits every time we think of that one. My question is, these fellows who came up with the conclusion that Pune is the third-oomphiest city in the galaxy and all that…please, please do tell us your route-map when you came to this city (assuming you came here, and didn’t depend on some city-father types who handed you some really creative facts and figures). Let’s see…You couldn’t have gone (by road) from University circle to Sancheti Hospital…no…then you would have not come to the conclusion that Pune rocks, rolls, and rules the planet. Could you have been breathing the air on Solapur Road, or trying to cross Fergusson College Road? Could you have been having lunch with our youth benumbed by their call-center jobs? Naah…then you wouldn’t have gone home impressed. My guess is, you were taken to one of those joints where the VJ/DJ/RJ slappably says ‘Hello Pune, let’s party’ every 20 seconds. Then someone gave you lots of daru to drink, blindfolded you and muffled up your ears, put on an oxygen mask and sent you home on a flight, but not before holding a gun to your head and getting you to give Pune third rank in your esteemed estimate. On top of it, you must have been carrying one of those one-parameter meters with you. Which goes ‘beeeeep beep…happening city’ every time you pass a mall or a mall-in-the-making. Bassss; your research done, you skipped home and thought up that hilarious bit of statistics. And now, taking you wafflers seriously, all kinds of poor devils with money to invest are going to rush here shouting Hello Pune!
I think I’ll move to quiet little Wai. And don’t you land up there and declare it the fourth-happeningest town in the world or something.
Well, chaps (joined by chapettes too) who go around making such a big fat hoo-ha every year out of valentine’s day, and how it is ruining our fiuu-thousand-year-old tradition are surely in the category of wel zaat nahi public.
But hello, surely their free-floating ire, which seems to have run out of targets, can be harnessed and redirected elsewhere? For instance, top-cop Julio Rebeiro had in the nineties asked them to step forward like real sher-ke-bachhe and get sent to Kargil. He was met with a deafening silence, apparently, and some of them told him they couldn’t go as Valentine’s day was approaching, and therefore a much more important war had to be fought and what was he thinking, sending these boys to remote places like Kargil when the enemy was right in our midst, and so on and so patriotically forth.
Apparently so dire is the need to while away time on petty matters (or, itka wel zaat nahi) that they now gatecrash parties, tear women’s clothes, and even video tape their victories – I’m guessing to go show it to the higher up (whose wel zaat nahi too, looks like). While the general public is now irritated and outraged at these delinquents, a worse thing has happened. People are now sniggering at them, and that snigger is turning into a nation-wide belly-laugh at the absurdity of it all. And what worse criticism can there be than being mercilessly laughed at. Even worse than being mercilessly beaten up.
But to come back to providing an agenda for our local Pune wel zaat nahis. First, a few questions. How come we never hear of you rioting, beating up, threatening and stripping culprits when our city is shaken by horrible eve-teasing incidents, rapes of women and minors, daylight robbing of people right outside Shivajinagar Station, murders of elders, and hit-and-run accidents? Where exactly are you at these times? And do these not constitute an outrage on our fiuu-thousand-year-old tradition? Haan? How come you don’t feel like disfiguring the obscenely huge hoardings of a builder who is under a cloud for the collapse of a balcony and the death of a kid? How come, in your bid to spend your time fruitfully, since wel zaat nahi, you feel more outraged by a shop front with its name not in Devanagri and rush off to the spot to mete out justice with your stone-throwing-kit? How come we never hear you shocked and outraged at massive shirish trees amputated and then uprooted?
Actually why ask you guys these questions. You and your ilk across the world are the same. Ready to riot and burn and kill on issues that matter not a jot to your day-to-day lives, actually. And quite happy to look the other way when real people with genuine life problems could do with some of your fervour and so-called righteousness. What you choose to be outraged about and hurts your ‘sentiments’ is indeed telling of where your heart and brain resides.
********
And on to more laughing matters. And some more questions. The findings of that Forbes study. Oh what a riot (laugh riot). Some of us are still prone to huge guffawing fits every time we think of that one. My question is, these fellows who came up with the conclusion that Pune is the third-oomphiest city in the galaxy and all that…please, please do tell us your route-map when you came to this city (assuming you came here, and didn’t depend on some city-father types who handed you some really creative facts and figures). Let’s see…You couldn’t have gone (by road) from University circle to Sancheti Hospital…no…then you would have not come to the conclusion that Pune rocks, rolls, and rules the planet. Could you have been breathing the air on Solapur Road, or trying to cross Fergusson College Road? Could you have been having lunch with our youth benumbed by their call-center jobs? Naah…then you wouldn’t have gone home impressed. My guess is, you were taken to one of those joints where the VJ/DJ/RJ slappably says ‘Hello Pune, let’s party’ every 20 seconds. Then someone gave you lots of daru to drink, blindfolded you and muffled up your ears, put on an oxygen mask and sent you home on a flight, but not before holding a gun to your head and getting you to give Pune third rank in your esteemed estimate. On top of it, you must have been carrying one of those one-parameter meters with you. Which goes ‘beeeeep beep…happening city’ every time you pass a mall or a mall-in-the-making. Bassss; your research done, you skipped home and thought up that hilarious bit of statistics. And now, taking you wafflers seriously, all kinds of poor devils with money to invest are going to rush here shouting Hello Pune!
I think I’ll move to quiet little Wai. And don’t you land up there and declare it the fourth-happeningest town in the world or something.
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