Your father has played dying

Of course you know of J. Huizinga.

You don’t?

I don’ believe you, Get outta here! You don’t really mean that? You do? You don’t know the guy? Not even a little bit? No?

Brother, (and sister, as our man Vivekananda said once in the continent discovered by Columbus and named after Amarigo Vespucci.

As an aside let me say this, My South and North American friends, you should have named your land after the ‘Patronymic’- Vespucci.

It’s only a humble thought, don’t take it amiss.

The United States of Vespuccica, that would have been delectable!)

But coming back to what I was saying,

brother, I am disappointed. This Huizinga guy is intellectually hot; he is irresistible though a wee bit abstruse. (I have only understood one line he wrote up to now and that fortunately is the subject of this post)

He is not new I know, has been around for some time, everyone seems to relish him too.

Munch, munch, crunch, crunch.

Lucky guy.

He seems to have incarnated in the isle of Japan by the look of it.

Neighborly people, the Japanese.

Once one of my countrymen visited these wonderful islands, like many in my land the poor guy had a poor sense of direction.

(This sense of direction has nothing to do with the sense of direction of one of my sweet friends. Honest to God)
Well the point is, we do not actually use our legs to get around to some place, we invariably make use of the wonderful instrument some call the larynx.

We ask every poor bastard we chance upon:

Bhai sab (Brother and Sir)……..

Or if it is a lady:

Bahin Ji (Sister and revered)……..would you….

Then there would be an interval (pregnant with silence) while we start to take out something from our pockets. It is an excruciating process. It could be a piece of soiled paper with the address written on it.

We have invariably put it in the deepest and the most inaccessible of our pockets. If we are wearing jeans it could be at the inner most recess near our very sanctum in a crumbled roll.

The poor prey is waiting patiently. We at last extricate the divine piece of paper. We are somewhat relieved too; we really had our doubts about recovering it without damage.

We then say with an enormous sense of achievement and importance due to the greatness of the place we want to get to:

Sir/Revered, how do I get to this place?

Our prey has a terribly hard time trying to decipher what is scrawled on the paper and if by luck he/she is a lab technician or a nurse they would manage it after some intense speculation about the ways a word could be written on a piece of paper by the most intelligent of the species.

Well as I was saying our countryman had the ill luck to ask directions from a Japanese gentleman while in Tokyo. Now every one knows that is the last thing one does in Japan.

The Tokyo-ite dropped everything else and took our man by the hand and did not let go till the destination was reached. Our man was in tears and was inconsolable afterwards. It was a case of the prey turning into a predator. The terrible Tokyo guy robed our guy of his favorite pastime of ‘dumb’ing it around in Tokyo in search oh his address.

The sad thing is it is otherwise in the case of our own Auto Rickshaw drivers here. It is rumored that one tourist had the luck to see seven Government Secretariats in a row on his journey and wised up somewhat after that: He is reported to have remarked to our Auto driver:

That is the seventh secretariat I am seeing.

The Auto guy turned round, smiled sweetly and passed on the delightful information:

Just three more to go you know!

Well we can’t blame the Japanese on those lines. In sense of humor you can’t beat them.

Remember the thing which comes out of the TV and the washing tray in the developing studio? That is what I am talking about, sense of humor. Well all who have seen the original Godzilla from the land of the rising sun would assent in one voice.

That Godzilla, it ate our innards. Poor Roshomon was impaled and displayed at the gates of that great and fighting people. It was a real pretty sight.

(Hollywood is miles ahead. It brings emotions into the adventure. There is nothing like our old flame stealing footage from us to save her job, to liven the plot up.)

No wonder Kurassova, Akiro followed Kavabata, Yasunari.

He took the decision right after the Godzilla premier.

Their Hara-kiri was out of despondency. They were living in the land where the sun never sets. But they were seeing darkness all round.

Well you know when there is darkness inside there is no point in having unending days of sunlight on the out side.
They did not want any extra suns too. But some provided them with two of them some time in the 1940's. Those were brilliant suns.

They warm the Japanese even now.

No wonder they have the spirit of forgiveness in them. They know what death is.

See what our man Huizinga says:

In his land(In Japan I mean and not anywhere in Europe. Don't be always Euro centric you guys ) in certain forms of conversations a dead person is supposed to be playing death.

(No, no not playing dead, as certain canine friends do, but playing death, it is a higher form of histrionics. You can only play it once in your entire life. So be careful, emote subtly)

What happens is this, in polite aristocratic conversations certain remarks would actually mean this:

"I hear that your father has played dying."

The implication of course is that he has gone to elevated spheres to play further.

Well there is the other extreme too. Where everything is looked upon as the most serious of things. I would not have to quote examples do I? It already exists in plenty.