The Worst of 2010: Part 1: Things that just couldn't go beyond 2 pages.

The Man behind the Underwear

If you were born in or before the nineties, you have probably heard about it- the underwear with pockets. Bagharam was the man behind it.

It was all over the television, up there with the cola wars, the toothbrush with German design bristles, the hair oil with Vitamin K, the shoe polish with enriched coal for natural shine, and the beauty soaps. But deep down we all knew that air time aside, the others were no match to the genius of the underwear with pockets.

Maybe you never bought them, maybe you never saw anybody wearing them in the streets, maybe there are no available sales figures in the public domain, but you just have to look at it on the grounds of pure genius.

Most of what comes these days is just over-hyped improvisation- Floppy to CD to DVD to Blue Ray. Underwear with pockets is not an improvisation on underwear. It’s a revelation- Underwear. Can. Also. Have. Pockets. Wow.

That’s like idly sitting in a chair in the 18th century and then suddenly going- why just atom, there could be electrons in the atom.

Somewhat like that.

So you take a man like Bagharam, and you think how nice it would be being Bagharam, and one day you are lucky enough to meet him and then he tells you that the best moment of his life was when he saw the then PM at some election rally. I felt him waving to me, he always said. I wish someone could tell Bagharam- grow up to yourself.

But most of us haven’t done anything half illustrious as underwear with pockets, so meeting Bagharam in person would justifiably be the best moment of my life. Like most people, I didn’t know the name of the genius behind the underwear with pockets, but as life would have it, I was one of the survivors of the November 8 bomb blast, and so was Bagharam.

However, calling it a bomb blast, and us survivors, I am deluding myself since it was hardly a bomb bomb and it never actually blasted. All that happened that day was a lot of smoke. It takes a week for the prime time news to let go of a full-fledged bomb blast, so ours would have barely made to the ticker tape.

The only bad part about it was that all of us survived. And that Police thought it had the suicide bomber, if any, in quarantine along with the rest of the survivors.

The good part about it was that I got to spend a little time with the genius of the decade. Although, I must tell you, talking to Bagharam doesn’t help much. The words come all warbling out of his mouth because he has no teeth.

We are all born that way- without teeth- he just stayed that way. That would be some esoteric medical condition the exact terminology for which even the doctors in the quarantine ward couldn’t tell. What we were told was it is genetic. His father never had any teeth, neither did he, and if he ever fertilizes somebody’s womb, it’s very likely that the kid would have no teeth.

One morning, the nurse asked Bagharam- “So, you got no teeth from your father’s side?”

“Yes.”

“So, that means you got your teeth from your mother’s side?”

“No.”

“So, you got your teeth from your father’s side?”

“No, I got no teeth from my father’s side.”

“That’s almost Catch-44.”