Long journey of being Coool

Sometime I sit back and wonder when was the last time I acted cool. It was not the college we didn’t have a more than 10 rupees at one time and once 1st 15 days of the month are passed we didn’t even carry a wallet.

Before I knew college was over and I was back home without a job. People of all shapes and sizes had a job or something to do… I didn’t have any… that was no time for being cool that was hide from the world period for me.



When I got a job I could only see gatekeepers, coffee vendor and house keeping staff below me… all were above me… all… even who joined with me somehow looked more important than me…maybe even the coffee vendor earned more than me… I couldn’t be cool then, you can’t be cool when people don’t know you exist. Sometimes I used to think if I die today it would take 2 days for my team mate at office or roommate to notice, 7 days for my land lady, 14 days for my parents back home and 3 months for the company to know I am dead.

No - being cool never hit me till I was 28… Stage was set and ideal situation… I was going to Croatia…1st person on 7 generation of Ashraf family to touch the Balkan soil… to meet my future wife to be… no one knew me there… I could act prince of Patiala… I did my preparation… I learnt a bit on yoga… Indian history…Indian food, jotted couple of stories in my mind about my encounter with cobra and elephant and black magic. I was ready in my own terms…

Things changed when I landed there… I was the last person to come out of the airport… 1 n half hour after everyone has left…I believe it was because they were trying to understand why would a guy from place like Kolkata who never saw so far as Indian borders would fly straight to Zagreb without any reason… but they said they were checking for the red alert on my name – Oh if you don’t know my full name is Syed Mohammed Imran Hossain Ashraf…

Anyway, when I came out I found myself developing an On the Spot coolness… ending all my sentences with “Man”… hey Man … what’s up Man… oh it was cool… within few days I realized none of the earlier preparation is working out… people there were just not interested with India in the way we fathom or expect them to be… Instead they wanted me to be very interested in their cannibal culture and jungle dance… good thing was my future father-in-law never found it interesting to take me for a Croatian cultural trip like my father takes everyone India. That’s a pain avoided.

But I gave a shot to my Indian culinary skills… and I had an attendance of 8-10 future-in-laws to taste my preparation. Smoke alarm went off twice while I was cooking, but the real fun started when the food was ready… what most of the people outside India don’t understand is Indian spices are there for centuries. They are hot and its hotness grows exponentially with the passing years. As I served my Kolhapuri daal and Khichri and people started eating I could feel… hear.. the food… going through their mouth to their colon like a bullet train… 2 minutes on the clock and people started making a beeway to the rest room… My brother-in-law puts his first taste of Indian food in a way, which roughly translates to the following in English “My bottom cheeks never had such a hot kiss before in the life”…

Coming back to being cool… Man at the end of every sentence did great for those 10 days… I continued with that coolness after returning to India…till the word Dude registered at my ears… I could never use the word Dude… my cool world fell apart with Dude ruling the coolness… I tried… god knows I tried… I ended up saying “Dude – how is it going man” … I was caught in the dude -man divide… but then it started fading… with the introduction of Orkut and Facebook - Bro became the new Dude like Dude was the new Man… It was easy I call all my friends Bhai… Bhai to bro was easy

Today I realized there is a new word catching up - Dog…now I think… how did this happen… from Man to Dog… coolness has travelled a long way like me…