When I was young….<\/p>\n
Hold on. Wrong start, I am not old enough to be saying that.<\/p>\n
When I was a kid, and when Indian TV was a kid ( that kind of puts things into perspective), there used to be a show called Aisa Bhi Ho Sakta Hai<\/i> on dear ol’ Doordarshan. This aired at 11 AM on Sunday, the Day of Days, just before Bhaskar Bhattacharya’s Alpha Plus<\/i>, and an hour after Ramayana<\/i>. To call it something like Guiness Book of Records would be stretching things too far – yes, it was about facts, trivia, “records” of a kind. You got to learn important things like the Howrah Bridge in Calcutta is the busiest bridge in the whole world, and that Cherrapunji in Meghalaya is the place that has the highest rainfall in the world. Good, patriotic stuff.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, I remember, they showed people doing weird things – like growing their fingernails long or dancing on broken glass and even someone chomping on tubelights like it was fried chicken. The weirdest, I thought, were the “strong” ones. The people who would sleep on the road, and allow a truck to pass on them. There was a long conversation between me and my father about whether this was all a “camera trick” ( I had heard of vague things called “camera tricks” even then – that kind of explained how Amitabh Bachhan could die in Sholay<\/i> and then die again in Deewar<\/i> and then kick ass in Toofan<\/i> and how Hanuman could expand and deflate at will in front of Arun Govil ) or the real deal. My father would explain, very patiently, that there were people who could do that because they practised a lot. <\/p>\n
So I asked my father if I could practise too. I could ask the neighbouring kids to drive a cycle over me, I suggested. Like any self-respecting father would, he promised he would whack me bad if I did something like that. Like any cover-your-ass-and-run son would, I discarded my plans. Life went on.<\/p>\n
Of course, the hypothetical question remained. Just how much would you need to practise to get a vehicle to drive over a part of your body without eliciting yelps of pain ( minor threshhold ) or without requiring surgery (major threshhold)? <\/p>\n
Well, now I know the answer, or at least part of it. <\/p>\n
You can have an autorickshaw drive over your foot, at normal auto-rickshawish speed, without even touching the minor threshhold. Matter of fact, you can have a cyclist ram your butt at top speed while having an autorickshaw indulge in the above activity with no freakin’ practice<\/i>!!! Amazing. <\/p>\n
But of course, this brings another hypothetical scenario into the picture. Suppose I had practised, suppose I had a parent of a more encouraging nature, I might have been the next guy you see on Guiness Book of Records, who lets a Boeing cross over his chest and then leaps up saying things like “Absolutely<\/i> smashing, old chap!” Shucks. My<\/i> children aren’t going to be denied when they come to me asking for basic things like having vehicles running over them. Nossir. Matter of fact, I am going to drive the vehicle myself, and teach them to leap up and say “Absolutely<\/i> smashing, old chap!” in just the correct accent.<\/p>\n
I need to get some balm for the butt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was young…. Hold on. Wrong start, I am not old enough to be saying that. When I was a kid, and when Indian TV was a kid ( that kind of puts things into perspective), there used to be a show called Aisa Bhi Ho Sakta Hai on dear ol’ Doordarshan. This aired […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}