The Quad Rule – If a movie has four male heroes, they will make sure they walk towards you four abreast, in slow motion, at least 4 times in the movie, one of which will be just before the interval.

The Bimbette Rule – The female side-kick will be a black-belt in kick-boxing or karate, since this naturally requires a dress code that keeps her legs free from sartorial entanglements (read skirts that are more than 6 inches in length).

The Duet Rule – 90% of songs will be sung by the hero and heroine, alternating stanzas between them and climaxing in the final stanza sung by both. 60% of the duets will have 20 couples, all dressed alike, matching the hero and heroine on every dance step. The other 40% will have passersby around the couple looking on tolerantly, smiling and cheering them on their journey of love.

The Car Chase Rule – The hero’s car will be the latest model of Ferrari, Lamborghini or Porsche in shining red, while the goons chasing him will be in an open-top Maruti Gypsy or such like; both will topple 3 vegetable vendor carts each, almost run over 10 villager types buying and selling things and will cross at least one railway track, with the train invariably whooshing past after the hero has just crossed.

The Item Song Rule – The item song will be the first scene shot for the movie, irrespective of its story line or plot. It will cost half or more of the movie’s budget. The number of supporting dancers gyrating around the curvy “item” could vary from 100 to 200, but the total amount of cloth used to make their dresses shall not exceed 10 metres. The number of drooling, panting and leering males trying to get up, close and personal with the “item” will vary from 50 to 100, but they will be dressed to the gills. Every ten seconds, the camera will zoom in on the item and do a systematic analysis of her asset allocations.

The Fight Scene Rule – No fight scene shall end under 10 minutes; no hero will be attacked by less than 10 goondas simultaneously; nobody shall resort to the use of any weapon that is likely to kill instantaneously (for the sake of the first sub-rule above); no tables or chairs will be left standing undamaged; the comedian sidekick shall fool at least two goondas into hitting each other rather than him; the heroine, if present, will participate in the last 15 seconds, saving the hero from an unexpected blow from the desperately losing villain. Cops shall arrive fashionably late, after the hero has vanquished the goons.

The Mommy Rule – The hero will have a mom. The hero’s mother will be an abandoned/neglected/overworked/penniless/ /stoic/sad (choose one or more) woman, clad in a white sari, most of the time. The only other person in the movie lower on the sob-scale shall be the heroine’s mother, if she exists.

The Daddy Rule – Heroines will have a dad. Daddies will have the smallest role in the movie and will be either tycoons who make money by bulldozing slums and building sky rises in their places, or bumbling, dim-witted idiots who are masters at social gaffes, irritating the hell out of their domineering wives. The former type will be dressed in 3-piece suits and found in boardrooms or race courses, while the latter type will be dressed in safari suits and found in the kitchen or the garden, making a mess of things. Despite these differences, they will have one thing in common. Both types of daddies will fail to recognize the hero when he comes to the heroine’s house in a disguise consisting of a large pair of glasses, a wig and a falsetto voice.

The Sister Rule – The hero will have a sister. She will be perfect in her studies, cook like a chef, dance and sing like a professional and be a paragon of virtue, thus attracting the villain’s eye. She will be dressed modestly till the time the villain decides modesty is not a virtue and attempts to get fresh with her. She will stagger home in disarrayed clothing and be seen till the hero has made public his resolve to exterminate the villain. She will not be seen thereafter in the movie.

The Brother Rule – The heroine will have a brother. The role of the brother will compete for brevity with the Daddy’s role (See The Daddy Rule above). If the heroine is unmarried and in love, the brother will be a smart, caring and protective brother who keeps her admiring male college mates at bay. Any upcoming hunk of a male model will fit the bill here. If the heroine is married, the brother will be a good-for-nothing, stay-at-home-and-come-in-the-way type Saala to his perennially annoyed and harassed Jeejaji. If he is available, Johnny Lever will play this role. If not, the producer will wait.

The Teacher Rule – The female teacher in a school or college will be an ex Miss World or Miss Universe and will have serious designs on the hero, who would be, but not look anything like, a student. The male teacher will be a fat comedian who invariably falls into the class every time he enters. He will try his best to impress the said female teacher, who will spurn all his advances with a carefully cultivated throw of her head and hair back.

The Student Rule – The hero will be a student almost all his adult life Рtopping his BA class in the old movies, being the best-dressed student of his MBA class in recent ones – and shall attend no more than 2 classes in a year. He will be found in the canteen, at the college square, on the library steps or jiving in the Cultural Festival Dance competition at all times that he is not on his motorbike. He shall never lose a dance competition, unless the heroine is on the other side.

I have personally never been fond of NYRs, but intermittently have been persuaded by peer pressure to make a few. Usually NYRs are a test of a person’s will power, and I have managed to find other ways and times of the year to test mine. For example, there was a time, early in my college and hostel life, when I began misusing the freedom I had won for myself by getting addicted to almost 10 cups of tea a day. Maybe addiction is the wrong, or rather too strong, term to be used here, for I did not really like the stuff a whole lot. But I just found myself saying “Yes” to friends and classmates whenever there was an invitation to go off to the canteen for a cuppa. This was the mid-seventies and I was in my mid-teens, and we were not yet spoilt for choice when it came to beverages, or anything else for that matter. For example, you wanted to buy yourself a car, and you had the royal luxury of choosing from among two models then made in India. You wanted to satiate your thirst, you could go with about four options, two hot and two cold. Choices were not too many in one’s life. And even if there were, as a student living off a subsistence allowance sent by my dad every month, I would have been hard pressed to exercise them. Good old tea was the cheapest option Рand still is, I guess – when it came to ordering yourself a beverage, hot or cold, assuming you were ruling out the stuff coming out of the municipal tap.

Anyway, I digress, for this is not a piece on beverages, nor about choices one makes in life, but about NYRs and why we make them. So to cut to the chase, and back to those college days, I did some introspection one day and came to the conclusion that I was letting myself be taken over by this dependence on tea, and talked it over with a close friend. Now this was a friend who not only drank copious amounts of tea, but supplemented it with as many, if not more, cigarettes dangling from his lips. He laughed off my few cups of tea as no cause for concern. I turned to another one, who was a teetotaller when it came to tea and cigarettes, and he painted some dire consequences of my “addiction”, almost implying that I would not live beyond four summers, if that. Caught between these two extremes, I made a personal choice. I decided to test my resolve by giving up tea altogether. So one fine day, I went cold turkey on tea. Neither friends, nor horses, nor all the King’s men could get me to sip a cup of tea. I had resolved, and resolved well. And I did have this nasty, tenacious, bull-dog kind of obstinacy when it came to some things. An attribute that I saw as a weakness at most times, but in this particular case, it was one hell of a blessing. My resolution was tested severely in the first few days, when the body craved for that liquid and when friends turned enemies, trying to entice, coax, cajole, force and even threaten me to give in. I battled on, and soon was winning handsomely. In about 10 days, I felt good about surviving that long, especially since I had seen many friends take on similar “I will quit” kind of resolutions and promptly break down within the first 24 hours. After the initial “break-out” period, it was comparatively easy. The only issue used to be when I visited my parents during vacations, and accompanied them to visit relatives and families in the neighbourhood. Since I was now a college-going “adult”, tea was routinely offered to me on these social visits. Turning it down seemed impolite, but I gave myself no choice. I chose to insist on being spared. Some insisted, some did not. Some thought I was being snobbish, suspecting me to be the descendent of an English Lord, who turned his nose up at anything but the finest leaves from Darjeeling. Others gave me admiring glances and chastised their own son for wasting money on tea and coffee, among other things. It was a mixed bag, really. I was not a hero, nor was I a villain in the eyes of people wanting me to join them for a cup of tea. And this suited me just fine.

I went 2 years and some months with this resolution, and then gave it up voluntarily when I realized that I might be becoming a slave to the resolution itself. So I told myself to chill, break off the resolution and start sipping tea again. So I was back to a cup or two a day, but never went into the kind of mode of dependence that I had earlier fallen victim to. So though this was not a NYR, it was as good as it gets when it comes to testing one’s will power.

The desire to sign up to a NYR stems possibly from two emotions. One is a sense of inadequacy when it comes to self-control. For example, you have been spending too much on branded clothes and accessories, and up pipes the Good Old Conscience, drawing your attention to that wardrobe full of high-priced jeans and designer suits that have not been worn more than once. So when the New Year rolls around, you find yourself making a “Spend Less on Brands” NYR. Or if you have been tucking into loads of chicken (or fish, or paneer, or whatever gets you drooling at the dinner table) at the umpteen conference lunches and dinners you attend, your self-governor rusted and stuck, you get into a fightback mode and resolve to give up rich food altogether. Absent this feeling of loss of control, you would not find much motivation in setting up NYRs. The other emotion that creates a ground fertile for NYR growth is optimism. The hope that you can prevail over a situation that is affecting you adversely. For example, we are forever hopeful of looking fitter and younger, and this gets us into signing up for the gym come New Year’s Eve, resolute in our desire to lose those ungainly pounds and trim the belly fat. Then there are people who are hoping to make that big promotion, but finding that the boss does not seem to share their enthusiasm for the elevation. Their NYR is full of promises to be punctual, better managed, more skilled, whatever! Whatever it takes to get the boss to finally notice you are more than a piece of furniture in the office. Absent this sense of optimism, how many of us would even bother to write up a few NYRs? So much for the psychological (some might say psychobabble) genesis of New Year Resolutions! What about their prognoses? What are the chances of their living beyond the first few days of the year? Will you see yourself giving them a stately burial, come February Рno post mortem required, thank you?

In today’s high-paced world, when we are over bombarded with stimuli, can we make NYRs that will last forever? Or should we scale back our ambitions and be more modest about honouring them? Or taking things further, should we start a trend of having celebration parties around the end of January to backslap each other and swap stories about how good it all was while it lasted?

I lean towards moderation of ambition, when it comes to NYRs. It is better to make a smaller, shorter-lived NYR than a grand one, signing away your life to chastity or abstinence. Go with 12 smaller NMRs, one for each month from January to December, and live up to them and rejoice. You get more variety, you get more practice and you increase your chances of success. And if you fail a few times (say three), nine out of twelve does not look as bad as zero out of three, does it?

You seem partly convinced, but are still giving me that quizzical look? You want to know where the heck does one get twelve NMRs from, when getting a couple of NYRs is itself a challenge? Don’t sweat, for I am in the process of building the world’s first New Year Resolution Bank – NYRB Online. Like you go online and google for a name or word or phrase and get a gazillion responses, you would be able to search for NYRs of your liking on this website I have conceived of. A NYR to suit every taste, every pocket, every barrier to entry and exit! Just drop them into your shopping cart and checkout as many as you want. You could walk down the Health aisle and pick one on not eating burgers in June, pick another on replacing your cooking medium with olive oil in November. Or stroll down the Lifestyle aisle and check out the ones on smoking (“March shall be my No-smoking zone”, “Only one cigar in all of July”, etc.), flirting (“No more than four dates in August”, “No lip locks with him all of September”, etc.) or spending (“No credit card purchases in April”, “Only Dutch treats on Valentine’s Day”, etc.). New sections added every day, new NYRs uploaded every hour! You can’t make life easier than this for the New Age Human, already strapped for time and spoilt for choice, can you? Of course, we shall soon be offering NYR monitors that will keep you from falling off the wagon. You checkout a few NYRs from the online store, and come into the NYR store and get fitted with a few micro-monitors that will constantly track your every move and keep matching it with the NYRs you bought. You stray from one, and a nicely positioned electric impulse shall do the needful. You falter on the second one, and the system docks you a grand for the violation. You make NYR breaking a hobby, and we send out armed guards to crack a few ribs. Customer satisfaction guaranteed – lifetime!

You want to know my NYR this year? Well, I have resolved to spend all my energies in designing and developing the World’s first NYR Bank in the coming year. I swear I am going to do it! Come January 2009, you will see me hard at work, making this resolution a reality.

Who shall monitor this NYR of mine, you ask? Ah now, that is the million dollar question! Amen.

Pramod voluntarily gave up his plum position as the Managing Director of Syncata in 2005 to focus on his passion for training, teaching and mentoring. He believes in having fun while doing whatever he does, and infects people with the same virus!  Contact him at pramodkjoshi@gmail.com.

You are shell shocked, are you?
Your sensibilities are raped, you say?
Your sense of peace is ripped apart, is it?
“Every time I pick up the newspaper in the morning,
I am assaulted by the stories and pictures on the Front Page.
There, 29 killed and 56 injured in Peshawar
Here, 5 burnt alive in communal violence
Oh, and look at this small side column
There it is, in fine print
Elderly couple clubbed to death in South Delhi
Yesterday was more gruesome, remember?
Was it 74, or 84, that were sent ahead of others
In that car bomb explosion in Baghdad?
Today seems to be a nicer day, by comparison
The numbers on the dead are lower, and the injured seem to be fewer
And look, no politician arrested for attempted murder, either!

But what I can say about tomorrow morning?
How will that be in terms of its routine invitation to nausea?
I just can’t stand this, day in and day out
My agony over strangers dying in far away lands
And the thought of their orphaned, maimed children
Are feelings I could jolly well do without!”

My friend, I see and hear your pain
And don’t want to doubt your sincerity one moment
You, like me, must be a man (or woman) who was
Raised in a happy family, in a time and age
When the front page was different and wars few and far between
Random killings were indeed random – as in very rare,
Scores were settled in private and deaths were not so public
And parents exhorted children to develop the habit of reading
By reading the newspaper regularly.

But, my dear nauseated friend, have you ever given thought
To the Front Page dilemma of the junior editor
Who is responsible for sifting through
At least ten, twenty times the number of pictures and stories
To decide which ones to accord the honour of prime coverage
Night in and night out, he takes calls on what a million eyes
Will see the next morning
Imagine his plight, spare him some thought
Think of his capacity for absorbing the gore that spews out
24 by 7
How does he do it, you ask?
I am not sure, but maybe there is some unwritten formula
Like if there are more than 50 dead, stick it at the top and use this font size
With less than 10 dead, don’t just bother!
But, if among the 10 dead is a VIP, switch to the first rule
Routine Iraq bombings in small print, please
US School shooting with over 5 dead, sure, people want to know
So get the text next to the cartoon, with the CNN video grab stuck to its right;
And with a communal rape, give it top billing while sending
That story of a simple intra-caste one, to page 7.

It must be complicated, this rule book, you wonder?
You bet, it must be, and with the benchmarks changing constantly
Not an easy one to keep updated.
Today’s “at least 50 dead” rule is tomorrow’s “routine” limit
News no more, and certainly not worthy of the Front Page.

Imagine what it would be like to be in the shoes of this man
Who for a living has to bear witness to this daily, mounting heap of horror!
While you and me, at least, have the luxury of moving
To the cartoon page, with a sigh, a sip and a flip.

Limerick

There was once a man called Shastry
Who was a student of Practical Chemistry
Till one day he –
Experimented with TNT –
And now he is part of History!

–

Pramod voluntarily gave up his plum position as the Managing Director of Syncata in 2005 to focus on his passion for training, teaching and mentoring. He believes in having fun while doing whatever he does, and infects people with the same virus!  Contact him at pramodkjoshi@gmail.com.

I am the leaf

That murmurs silently among its thousand sisters
While a raging storm tries to uproot the tree.

I am the bough

That is weighed down by the load of many dead branches
Yet sticks it out in the dead hope of a living future.

I am the root

That knows the ground is slowly turning into a morass
But also that uprooting myself holds the promise of death.

I am the bark

That has endured the love messages of a thousand torn lovers
Who have never come back to embrace me again.

I am the sap

That is aware of the slow poison that intolerance is injecting in me
Turning me into a river of silent, seeping, seething hate.

I am the flower

Whose lovely colours bring to shame the flowing plume of a peacock
Yet whose scents are as intoxicating as those of plastic.

I am the trunk

That sits smug in the belief that it holds the world aloft
While dogs find it “convenient” and termites burrow through its veins.

I am the fruit

That hangs every season in the hope of ripening to my juicy potential
But is plucked away mid-term for a quick and dirty trip to the market.

I am the tree

Of a thousand failed promises, a million shattered dreams
Of a sickening sense of inconsequence, a destined decay of value
Of a hopeless cacophony of fears, a senseless competition of worth
Of many topsy-turvy twists of fate, many entanglements of pain.

Yet…

I am also the bud

That springs to life in a daily ritual of renouncement followed by love
For living a new tomorrow, for giving a new hope to the forest around me.

It moved
I imagined
It was real
Life-like, ready to attack
I believed
It breathed.

It stood
Arms aloft
Appearing bigger
The breeze billowing
Its ramrod leggings
I shuddered
It sniggered.

It waved
As if to shoo
Me away
The green field behind
A tempting possibility
That I lost again
I wavered
It wondered.

It laughed
I thought
At me, my inadequacies
My attempts to succeed
Risking ridicule
Was not my destiny
I failed
It succeeded.