Swine Flu over the Cuckoo's Nest. Laugh now

The evil air of Swine Flu has engulfed our city and has in the process clouded the minds of our politicos, who want us to stay away from Multiplex cinemas and malls for four days so that they could... surprise surprise... do nothing magical in particular. I mean I was expecting to see some bigtime guerilla fumigation exercise with an N95 masked SWAT team, okay this is not a Hollywood film, but at least some sort of a cleanup or infection trail identification exercise that would have left the city a lot less H1N1 prone on Monday.

But no such. Might as well have let us watch Kaminey and what's-that-other comedy caper with Genelia D'Souza during our less-proud moments of humour craving, qualitatively speaking.

In other news, I have discovered a talent for dropping mobile phones from heights directly proportional to the value of the handset. I think I achieved economic equilibrium with this habit with my previous phone, the Nokia E62 which cost about 12k and could take a fall from the first-floor of a low-ceiling building without as much as one whimper. Falling from the topmost berth of an AC 3-tier train coach was a piece of cake. I used that phone for 2 years and offered it to gravity at the rate of 1 drop every week and it still functions beautifully.

But my new phone, the El Fragilo Nokia E71 is a high-maintenance pampered lady in comparison. I mean I once put it along with my house-keys in the same pocket and it protested with a permanent scratch on its screen. Nokia, what made you assume everyone who used a Rs 20k business phone wore silk clothes? Second time, I dropped it while seating myself inside a car and it fell onto the car floor. Since then, it has decided to behave vindictively by switching on and off by itself twice every hour. The scoundrels at the Nokia service center cleverly detected that the phone had fell and refused to cover it under warranty. They should all be using their forensic acumen in saving us from gun-wielding 20-year-olds who suddenly crop up from Karachi in dinghies and exterminate beer bellied Indians in Colaba pubs.

And I am sure that when I left the Nokia premises, they all had a sadistic laugh and made a long distance call to Finland to some engineer with fifteen s's and twenty seven e's in his name and thanked him yet again for designing a fall-sensitive phone that could help them further the fine art of customer harassment.