Rakhi weds Ramdev

It’s wedding bells yet again in tinsel town. Another celebrity marriage on the cards. Rakhi Sawant is marrying Baba Ramdev. And guess who's the busiest of the lot? Nah! not Rakhi, not Ramdev. It's the media!!

While newspapers and news channels are busy getting bites and quotes one juicier than the other, NDTV Imagine is busy with the wedding preparations. Work has been allotted to various teams suited to their profiles.

One bunch is out arranging a mom for Rakhi. The production team is assigned this job as they can judge who’ll suit the best for the role. The editorial team is scripting a sob past of her and her family. The channel’s security is being trained to ensure Z security measures in case Rakhi's ex-husband Elesh Parujanwala attacks spears and daggers. No not to get back Rakhi but to get back his yoga guru Ramdev.

Ah! Elesh secretly enrolled with Ramdev’s Yogpeeth to get a life after being kicked out of his short marriage by the then wife Rakhi. He paid stinking amounts to get Ramdev as his personal trainer for Yoga. Now he may be insecure of loosing an efficient yoga guru as he will have to sever all ties with him once he marries his estranged wife...extranged on a bitter note to be precise.

And this is not all. NDTV Imagine has a bigger job at hand. That of searching for Ramdev. We hear that Babaji has gone underground along with his close aide Acharya Balkrishna after hearing about Rakhi’s desire to tie the knot with him. No that’s not because he hates Rakhi or he’s scared of Elesh. It’s because he’s scared of spouse rivalry after marriage. He feels he’s no match for Rakhi’s ‘gift of gab’.

According to the undercover correspondents reporting from Ramdev’s underground hideout somewhere in the basements in his very own The Little Cumbrae Island, off the fishing town of Largs in Scotland, Ramdev was last spotted watching the Amitabh starrer Abhimaan which is based on the story of an ambitious and famous husband who is unable to save his happy marriage because of his jealousy for his talented wife when she professionally overtakes him.

But Babaji Rakhi Sawant is not in your industry. How can she be competition to you? He says he fears that she is capable of attracting the media much better than he can. Anyway, we believe NDTV Imagine has the skill set to persuade Babaji. Once they begin talks, he’ll be head over heels in love with Rakhi err or is it heels over head? Whatever, all that matters is he’ll be in love.

Everything else is in place. The venue of the marriage reception is Ramlila Maidan in Delhi and Ramdev’s wedding costume: drag.

Living In a Crazy World

So Suresh Kalmadi has done what no other Indian could! He's now in the league of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D Roosevelt, Hitler and Stalin. And what's common? Dementia.

For those who can't recall their biology lessons, here's the definition of dementia. It is a loss of brain function that occurs with Parkinson's disease affecting memory, thinking, language, judgement, and behaviour. Uh! don't worry if you forgot your biology lesson. You don't have dementia. Yours is just a natural and universal case of short memory where we may just not remember some of our unpleasant past.

Coming back to Kalmadi's achievement, I would say all Indians should thank their stars for the Commonwealth Games scam and Kalmadi's subsequent arrest. It's only after all these developments, that he thought of seeing a psychiatrist and hence his dementia could be diagnosed. We've been saved of bigger troubles which could've been of the intensity of World War if psychiatrists of international acclaim are to be believed.

They've said that WW-II could have been avoided if Woodrow Wilson had bowed to his dementia. They also say that millions of Russians would have been saved if Stalin had seen a psychiatrist. They've figured out that the Yalta negotiations between Franklin D Roosevelt and Stalin at the end of WW-II in 1945 may have been influenced by Roosevelt's dementia. Imagine who all were at the negotiating table? Two world leaders and their respective dementias! No wonder all the devastating consequences of WW-II.

That makes me wonder if the Indian and Pakistani premiers need to spend some time with their psychiatrists. Had we thought of it earlier, we could have avoided all the continuing disturbances between the two countries. Mr Kalmadi is a whole six decades late in enlightening us. But nonetheless.

Now that we've picked up the topic, it occurs to me that the US government officials must have brought in added dementia each time they intervened in peace talks between the two countries. They have better chances of being affected, as they have a history of the disease in their top most leaders  like Wilson and Roosevelt. Could federal debt crisis have anything to do with the US' dementia history? I mean maybe George Bush and now President Barack Obama may want to see their shrinks.

Moving away, if shrinks say that dementia of the then world leaders led to WW-II, shall we say that all terrorists at present may have dementia. We can do little about curing all of them, but the Indian government can begin with Ajmal Kasab, the Norwegian administration can begin with Andres Behring Breivik, and the FBI can begin with David Headley. It may give some leads.

Also, the governments concerned should try and make it soon because dementia causes memory loss. What if Kasab, Headley and Breivik were to forget all details about their misdeeds? They should hurry up in case of Kalmadi too. If it's too late, he may not recall in his most natural sanities that there exists in this world something like 'sports' leave alone CWG. 

On the other hand, Kasab must be secretly wishing that all Indian officials and leaders get dementia, Breivik and Headley would be wishing the same for the Norwegian and the US officials. Ousted IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn is praying that Nafissatou Diallo gets the disease. And President Barack Obama and Republican House Speaker John Boehner maybe wishing dementia for each other even as they exchange 'pleasantries' over the fed debt crisis while I write this piece.

What next? We wake up to the uneasy reality that we are living in a world full of crazy people. Thank God dementia is not contagious.

So Harry Potter, What Next?

So what next after all the farewell parties and interviews are over? Does Harry Potter plan to tour the world? Or just bask in the glory of all the success he got when kids of his age were learning how to spell success? Well, from what I know, he wouldn't be doing either! He's got some serious work. He has his hands full. So says Mugsy my messenger.

Mugsy - My Messenger

Here's the list of assignments Harry Potter has been proposed:

Indian premier Manmohan Singh has connected with Albus Dumbledore, the founder and leader of the Order of the Phoenix. Now that Voldemort is dead, they may not need Potter for a while. So the Indian government can bring him on board. Scams, blasts, "foreign looking objects" on minsters' tables and much more is happening here which needs a wizard's touch to get sorted.

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai has also written to Dumbledore. Too much of chaos. After the assassination of Karzai's half-brother and the bombing during his service at the mosque, the Taliban have now released a tape which shows them killing Pakitani policemen, "the enemies of Allah" as the Taliban calls them in the tapes. That's supposed to mean that the Taliban is the friend of Allah.

The third in the list is our immediate neighbour Pakistan. They want Harry to use his wizardry to tell them what's up. Who's who and what everybody in their country wants. Dumbledore is known to have told the Paki administration to come up with a more detailed and specific report. The country's leaders are confused about who should be assigned the tedious task of preparing an organised report about a messed up state. They have understood to have told Dumbledore that they would need Harry's assistance to do this job as well. Well, Dumbledore is walking around and humming to himself, keeping up to his name which means 'bumblebee' in early modern English.

Last but not the least, Mugsy tells me someone desperately wants Harry back home in Britain. Any guesses? Well, media mogul Rupert Murdoch is looking for a more effective paparazzi. Phone tapping landed him foam-pied in the House of Commons. Wizardry is a guaranteed fool proof technique. Atleast when the master wizard Harry Potter is at work, you can bet no one will get caught even if you published previous night's pictures straight from Prince William's bedroom.

Meanwhile, Gillette and all other shaving foam makers are already at work trying to find out the brand of the foam which a man "lobbed into Murdoch's face at point-blank range." Why this brand hunt now? Remember Bush being shoed at a press conference in Baghdad in Dec 2008?

The Turkish shoe company, Ramazan Baydan, that made the shoe, experienced an immediate surge in sales. It received 30,000 orders in the very first week after the incident!! Taking lead from this, foam-makers are now out to make a killing out of the pie in Murdoch's face. Let's see who hits the jackpot. Who knows even they may be thinking of hiring Harry Potter for the job.

Mugsy's out already to get the news.
Cartoon courtesy: Coghill