Aisle be Damned by Rishi Piparaiya

Rishi Piparaiya has truly outdone himself and has shown himself to be a master of satire. He has shown great care and acute observational skills in picking the most annoying and embarrassing of things that happen in one's day to day exchange with the airport and it's queer inhabitants and projected them in a hilarious and thoroughly entertaining way. He has given an whole new outlook to the things that happen in and out of an airplane. Seriously who would have thought that my missing jacket was actually stolen by the Italian mafia. 

Rishi uses a delicate and simple style of writing to convey his story and that too with an even flavor of humour and satire. There is a chance that his sense of humour, predominant his style of humour would come across as slapstick to some but it is undeniable that he got a suave way of making his readers laugh. Anyone who has ever been on a flight and anyone who has seen the way the various quirks of the aluminium tube that flies will find it interesting and can relate to it seamlessly. It is just an understatement to say that Rishi has outdone himself.

They book though randomly satirical, is not random at all in organization. The book is neatly edited and organized as in the order of which the events would occur in an actual flight, from take off to landing and this differentiate 'Aisle be damned' from a regular book of jokes and into a humorous page turner. I will though advice the ones who have not flown to keep away, you don't need to add to your aviatophobia do we and secondly most jokes would appear to be tasteless and blown up to a person who is unaccustomed with such an environment as an airport. 

But for everyone else this is hilarious and light hearted, and would make your stomach hurt from laughing. I personally found the beginning and end to be rather bland and tasteless in nature as compared to the rest of it. I give the book a 'good' status and recommend it exclusively for all fliers, frequent and otherwise. The swaying hips awaits... *chuckle*

In Association with Jaico Publishing House.

Understanding Chennai

Chennai is not a city of joy, nor is she haunted by the phantoms of melancholia. Chennai is neither plain nor placid, She has a sense of vigor and liveliness inside of her. I find it particularly hard to attribute any specific emotion to her, not because she is devoid of emotions but because she shows it all without prejudice. She has no sorrow flowing right across her heart, nor is she known for the grant patios of procrastination. What she is and what she has always been is that she is real.

Chennai is as real as it will ever get, unlike many of her friends she upholds no pretense, she wears no facade and she embodies no plasticity. Her denizens are like she is, simple and real. In every alley that dots her backyard, is an women who scrounges for her children, a man who struggles to make the ends meet. She is not the adobe of the ultra rich but the tree under whose shades sleeps the normal man. One can see in the dried up eyes on the sun scorched faces of Chennai the harsh realities of life.

While in her backyard you may not find the soft spoken, civilized beings of Vienna, nor will you find coat donned bosses of New York who looks at all life with no emotion but disgust. But here you wind find simpletons, workers and laborers, You will see the educated educators or the men of service, and mostly servants of one of its many civil bodies. I pose not to say that they are humble and well behaved, but I insist that they are real and depict on their faces real emotions both good and evil.

Scratched across her face is a very thick line, bloated and black that separates the cities tiny rich community from the vast poor ones. This is the story of any of India's mammoth cities but here you will not find imitators who try to scale the big divide with fanciful appearance, Here you wont find people pretending to be anything other than what they are, except may be a micro minority that is still yet to find its place in this discomforted city. The leisure of Chennai lies in understanding the reality of who you are and when that itself is in great doubt she can at times be alien and at others discomforting. The rich of Chennai lies in its own world and the other  is seldom seen in its vastness. They may be playing pretense and that they only exists here and the others simply don't bother, they show a kind of indifference that is graceful in a way. They just the let them be and let themselves be.

If you venture to reach out and touch the heart of Chennai, you wont hear the calm serene musicals of the beating heart but a rather hurried and uneven one of a struggling heart. She would bleed under your touch and you would feel the warmth of blood flowing through your hands. The harshness of Chennai is not exactly in the hot and humid climate of Chennai but in the hard and unforgiving realities of life that dot her face. Yet she is not a sad and devastating city, she is happy as life is. In her trains you will find fathers playing with their sons, seated on the steel floors. In her streets you will find mothers feeding their daughters while making a dainty living at her numerous street shops.

I think I have been in Chennai long enough to feel the pulse of Chennai. long enough to understand her amazing eccentricities. All one have to do to understand the realities of Chennai is to look beyond the scorching sun, the humid air and the coarse water. When you are ready to do that she herself prepares to give you a couple of hard lessons, lessons about the realities of life. It is a sin to be blind when you can see, to be deaf when you can hear and to be unkind when confronted with great human tragedy. I am fascinated by the nudity of Chennai, her realities are never hidden they are visible and plain, most importantly she is real. May be that's why I have been slowly falling in love with her.

Image Courtesy : Well-Bred Kannan