Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Shake-ira in a corporate fest....

Philips Innovation Campus (PIC) completed its ten years in India; and they had a week long celebration, calling it a festival would be just to its scale and grandiosity. The week long of fun ended in a family get together of PICians (that’s how they call themselves) at Palace Grounds, Bangalore.

Under the huge tent had gathered anywhere close to 2000 plus junta. I like a faithful family member of my friend, who incidentally has almost no family here, accompanied him to this get together. It was an incidental advantage that they had high tea and dinner, on the house! Well now you know what holds my faith.

Anyways, the high tea was good, and very high. Pastries, chicken tikka , patties, lukewarm tea and barely hot coffee were available and I had all of them in multiple rounds until my stomach could take no more. Well I actually respected the amount of effort and time they have had put in bringing up the great mix of delicious food and didn’t want any of it to be thrown away, just because it wasn’t finished, so I kept on going.

Apart from arrangements for filling your belly, they had a mix bag of programs. A fashion show of children, children from 8 months to well I better say not. Yes 8 months, and we say ban child labor. Then there was fashion show, which was more like dancing wearing flashy clothes. They ‘danced’ around on Shakira tunes and tunes of other Bollywood croon-ies.

And then comes Javed Jaffery on stage. And this was the best part of the whole gathering, except for that another best, that one lady in that dance in fashion show or fashion show in dance, whatever it was.

He made the people there laugh and I laughed a lot. One of the few stories he said, though not verbatim:

All the big companies, corporate world have become responsive to the plagues of the society, one of them being AIDS. So they have all started manufacturing condoms with own brand name and even the punch line.

Reliance Condoms: Kar lo duniya mutthi main
NIKE Condoms: Just do it
NOKIA Condoms: Connecting people

The best of all:
Hero Honda Condoms: Fill it, shut it, forget it.


Then he invited some of the head honchos on stage for a short game of dumb-charade, which later on drifted to mimicry; they didn’t know much of stuff. Like this gentleman, must be in high position given his bald and shining head marked by stray strands of grey hairs, who didn’t know how to enact his favorite actor. Poor him, either he didn’t have a favorite actor which is bad or else he didn’t know how his favorite actor acted which is worse. The best of this head honchos heading was still to come.

Javed then asked this another gentleman to dance on one of the Shakira songs, to say in Shakira words, around the world on my bouncing butt! So this guy’s humongous butt swayed from side to side, up and down, from here to there. Shakira had a heart attack somewhere. Don’t come saying heart attack can happen only in the heart and not somewhere. This somewhere is for some geographical location. This one nice chap sitting next to the raised platform, in an effort to buttress his boss, or in this burst of Shakira emotions, jumped on the stage with garland of plastic flowers; put the flowers around this dancing Shake-ira, went down on his knees and started a slow motion tribal kneel-down-dance. The more-Shake-ira understood his cue, arched his back and started hopping from one foot onto another as if trying to simultaneously jump and shove his member into this fan’s mouth. It looked so cheap and ghastly on stage, and amusing knowing that one of the artist in this soft late-night-view-type will be one taking you next monthly review meeting!

Bemused, Javed intervened saying “This is not a dance bar, you kneel-down-dance person please get off the stage.” Literally the only thing that he needed was throw some Rs. 10 currency up in the air!

And I was head over heels. The entire row, column of chairs looked askance wondering “Why couldn’t I laugh as loud as him?”

A helluva time. Full time masti, courtesy they damsel in dance-fashion-show and this little-more-Shake-ira.

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