Good for laughs

Laugh One:

25% of the women in this country are on medication for mental illness. That's scary. It means 75% are running around untreated!

Laugh Two:

"And God promised men that good and obedient wives would be found in all corners of the earth".

Then He made the earth round and He laughed and laughed and laughed.

Thanks for those, Lavona. And thank God we have grown to be old enough to enjoy them without thinking about whether we are men or women, and whether or not we should therefore be offended!

Apology

I have been neglecting this poor blog for a long time. My bad, as they say who cannot speak English. Actually I haven't been feeling funny lately. And Bengal's annual madness is coming again: never fails to give me the heebie-jeebies. Thank God I'll be far away.

A thought: it would be nice if my readers were to send me links to things that have caught their eye lately, things that deserve a good laugh over. I can then at least draw attention to them on this blog: that would be a good way to keep it alive.

Terrific hailstorm again!

I wrote a post here in April 2013 titled Nature's violent beauty which a lot of people have read. Well, the day before yesterday there was a terrific thunderstorm all over the district (it's April again!), and though there wasn't much of a hail shower in Durgapur, some nearby places looked as if there had been heavy snowfall. Click here for a photograph (from my newspaper dated April 22).

'Hi, Rahul'?

Rahul Gandhi asked a gaggle of college girls to address him as 'Rahul' rather than 'Sir'. 

I have no quarrel with his personal preferences - maybe, as one commentator has suggested, pushing 50, he enjoys teenagers dealing with him more like a peer than an uncleji - and democracy is all very well, but is that how an aspiring prime minister should behave? Does it not take away much of the gravitas which has always been considered essential to the position? Should a president or PM aim at being a passing celebrity with overgrown children like a cricketer or pop star?

Even in the US, where they are very informal about most things, they habitually say 'Mr. President' or 'Sir' when addressing the Chief Executive. Are we trying to become more Yankee than the Yankees?

I am a mere small-town private tutor. But thank God no current or ex-pupil, or their parents, unless they are much older and close to the family, would dream of addressing me as 'Suvro'!

A certain winning slogan for Didi

My daughter and I were discussing the madness of vegetarians/vegans (my suggestion is just send them to Siberia and let them find out how many days they can survive), when it occurred to me that Mamata Banerjee needs only a one-line brahmastra to annihilate the BJP in this state at least during the coming Lok Sabha polls. She should just tell all Bengalis that if the BJP came to power it would try its damnedest to prevent them from feasting on fish and meat... if the alarm spread, I doubt whether any BJP candidate would get more than one vote: his or her own.

Right royal mess

Prince Philip has just had what could have been a very nasty accident on the road, and escaped without a scratch, though seriously shocked and shaken. See this.

The old fellow was driving his own car. A very heavy vehicle, an upmarket SUV, so how he managed to overturn it is beyond me, especially considering he was merely getting out from a by-road on to a highway, so his speed would have been barely above zero.

The point is, the man is past 97. He is still driving! Makes you wonder. I am only 55 - a babe beside him - and I take a driver with me on every long drive... yet I used to love driving so, once upon a time!

But then, if I had been Prince Philip - his country, his health, his social position, his kind of car - I might have behaved very differently too, now if not at 97.