Incredible Truths

I have always wondered how the animals that roam the road, and I mean the ones that necessarily have to use four legs and not the ones that choose to, often characterize the local flavor. Not the cuisine, the flavor of the place, so to speak. You know, the kind of thing that makes a guy yell his gizzards out selling eggplants and what not at 6 in the morning, clearly misguided into believing that decent people wake before 8. Or, if you will, the kind that makes that little meter go kaput, and instead force you to engage in some intellectual exchanges regarding time, distance, and space - if the Auto has any for you or not. Chennai has dogs and Trichy cows. The whole of Kerala, of course, has fish. Any smart alec comments about fish not being on roads will be met with the curt, cutting and sharp retort that roads aren't in Kerla, as much as rivulets.

In this vein it must be mentioned that my current whereabouts has pigs on the road. The type that were never taught hygiene, grunt, choose to play right in the way of diligent people minding their businesses early in the morn. and of course, eating everything in sight. The astute observer would no doubt have, well, observed, that I spend most of my life in such a set-up - the inmates of Lapis are notorious for their upkeep, or lack of it. Yet I mean pigs in the literal . Actual, flat nosed, oink-oinking, soon to be sausage types.

Speaking of pigs, I was called one, with numerous titles attached, by a close friend yesterday. The issue was a trivial one, simply a case of a slip of hearing. I was pretty confident that she mentioned a Canadian Godzilla, but when I ventured to suggest that Godzilla, being Japanese, would have been exported to a score of countries and that hence, she was as likely to find a Canadian Godzilla as a Sudaneese Godzilla, I was promptly called an extremely well qualified pig.
Further investigation revealed that she had, in fact, spoken in a tongue known only to signboards and bus conductors in a certain cosmopolitanu cityu.

A note on the 'u' concept. If highly placed sources in the government are to be believed (meaning the guy fixing the telephone pole) the 'U' movement was a direct marketing retort to the 'I' movement. While the 'i' stood for intelligence, individuality and incorrigible-overkill, the Naidu's and the Krishna's sat together and decided that since the Indian way always puts the guest above self, ours would be the 'You' movement. For marketing reasons (and because SMS is the next big fad after Buddhism, Power Yoga and Waging Expensive Wars) this became 'U'. Further, one family, being of kind, generous and slightly dull disposition, said that since they had U's almost everywhere, from cheppu to sudoku, ceded the chair of the movement, the lantern of progress and what not to the other. Thank U very much, they said, and merrily went about repainting signboards.