We were told, etiquette demands that you never ask a woman her age nor ask a man his salary. An offshoot of this are the numerous jokes about women hiding their age. Of course today it is no longer taboo for women to not-hide their age. So ladies and gentlemen, presenting…

Humour template – 2 :: Women’s age, men’s salary

Whenever a woman tells you her age, ask, if you are in return expected to disclose your salary.

Note: This is only for men. However women could improvize and do the corollary.

Scenario:

She: “…blah, blah… and now they tell me this when I am 30…”
You: “Should I tell you the CTC or take-home?”
She: “What??”
You: “I’ll have to tell you my salary, right? Now that you just told me your age.”

This works better when there are other people present. In which case you could modify it slightly and involve another man to hedge the joke. Additional advantage: Greater the number of people, higher the chances of at least some of them getting the joke in the first place!

Scenario :

She: “…blah, blah… and now they tell me this when I am 30…”
You: “Jammy, you will now have to tell her your salary!”
Jammy: “Why??”
You: “She just told you her age!”

(Needless to say, this scenario assumes you are not Jammy!)

Obviously the immediate stimuli for this post has been the enormous expectation thrust upon me by being listed in the humour category of this compilation of top Indian blogs!

It was my friend Niyam, who had once (circa 2003-4) suggested that I come out with a humour D.I.Y (do it yourself) paper. As much as I liked the idea, there was no time in life to do it.

Then I met Jammy at work (circa 2005). Jammy was unabashed about his aspiration to be a stand-up comedian. We got along very well, as we would keep cracking jokes given the slightest of opportunities. And then (here is the scoop) Jammy would go home and neatly package some of those jokes into original posts that one saw on ouchmytoe! (Sadly he had like a 100 other sources like me, so I could never sue him for copyright infringement.)

And then the other day Jammy wrote this “How to create your own jokes” post and it occurred to me, that the time had come to start building on the humour D.I.Y paper that Niyam had suggested — lest Jammy beat me to the patents office on this!!

So here goes…

Humour template – 1 :: Wrong name repartee

You would have faced situations where the person talking to you addressed you by a wrong name. I have faced this a lot. The most common being, called Rohit. I guess the two names seem smilar or have similar associations to many people. The other common mis-attribution is when people have called me Vivek or Karan. I know that’s because there have been semi-famous individuals called Vivek Razdan (cricketer) and Karan Razdan (TV actor and director). So people remember the surname Razdan and forget the name Rahul and then from their mental associations they end up dishing out Karan or Vivek! In fact my thesis guide (during my B.Arch days at School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi) kept on calling me Karan for most of the semester, and I was doing fairly well grade-wise. And then one day, when I had to tell him that my name was Rahul and not Karan, my grades started falling! (Sure, there could be other reasons too for that!)

Coming back to the template…

So when someone calls you by a name other than yours, make sure in your reply to address the other person by name. Only, someone else’s!

Scenario:

Ajay (addressing me): “Rohit, I appreciate your work, but I had expected better.”
Me: “See Ajit, I admit I could have done better. But…”
Ajay: “Who’s Ajit???”
Me: “Who’s Rohit??”
Ajay: “Oops, I am sorry! That was smart.”
Me (with a smug expression): “hehe…”
Ajay (already having lost a psychological battle): “On second thoughts, your work isn’t that bad either.”

This needs a little practice, but works like a charm!

Extra impact is assured when the substitute name you use is of a person who this person doesn’t like!

There is something self-esteem-battering about someone not remembering your name. So this a quick and crisp way to not only do damage control for your self-esteem, but also embarass the errant person and help you score a few psychological brownie points!

Bring out the cakes and a solitary candle! This blog turned ONE a few days back!

In this one year I have written 72 posts (73 including this one). That roughly translates into a post every 5 days. Not bad! So neither have I been slothful to the extent of my keyboard gathering dust and grime, nor over-zealous to the extent of obsessive compulsive blogging!

The 37K page views work out to over 100 views a day. Considering that I always held each of his centuries against Tendulkar, I am eating crow in tom tomming this figure.

Each of the 72 posts has been seen some 520 times (average).

I have received some 322 comments in all. Which works out to 9 comments in 10 days. Or a little over 4 comments per post.

This blog has been cited by WordPress in its Top 100 Blogs of the Day listing on various occasions:

Top posts: January 16, 2007
Top posts: January 14, 2007
Top posts: January 04, 2007
Growing blogs: January 03, 2007
Top posts: January 03, 2007
Growing blogs: November 20, 2006

And then a few weeks back Amit Agarwal — the face of blogging as a profession in India — mentioned in an interview on iLeher that he liked reading Swadeshe! Dang! Why did he do that? That puts pressure of performance on my lazy shoulders!

And then he has gone ahead and mentioned Swadeshe in his compiled list of India’s top humour blogs. Wait and who do I have for company there? Jammy (perhaps the only Indian blogger who has positioned himself as a seriously funny blogger) and Greatbong (who is to blogging, what ShahRukh Khan is to recent Hindi cinema — a very bright bloke, who all other bright blokes want to be friends with! Remember SRK being the muse of Karan Johar, Aditya Chopra et al). Now this places on me the additional burden of not only writing but also writing funny things!

Before I close this post, for reasons that may not need much explaining, I have to acknowledge the contribution of my wife! Who I, in a stroke of inspired genius, co-opted as a stake-holder in my blogging activity when I sat with a sullen face & laptop deliberately kept at an angle so that she could see the screen.

“What happened?”
“I guess I’ll give up blogging.”
“Why?”
“I don’t think I am good enough.”
“Why? What is this (pointing to the WordPress dashboard stats)?”
“See I have only got some 30-odd people reading me in the recent few days. I guess that’s all I deserve.”

At this point she sees that the graph is on a downward slope — which means it did have a peak previously.

“But see, here you had more than a 100 views. It means there was something you were doing then which was helping this figure.”
“Nah! Nothing. These figures are all trash. Just beacuse I was blogging more often, they say there were more visitors.”
“But they right.”
“Hmm (barely able to conceal my glee).”

And since that day, in a manner befitting of an investor querying the business head of a unit — she expresses her disapproval every time the visitor stats graph shows a downward movement!

“I think you need to write more often.”
“But that would take a lot of our time. Remember we have to go shopping for curtains tomorrow?”
“Don’t worry, I will take care of the shopping. You must write a post this weekend.”
“You sure? It’s just a blog. I’ll update it when I am done finalizing our holiday plans.”
“That you can do next week. As it is we are not leaving tomorrow. So what’re you going to write about?”

That’s how I have been managing for the whole of last year :)

And to the folks reading this — Thanks for being such a tolerant and forgiving audience.