Sunday, December 21, 2008

All I want for Christmas …. an open letter to Mrs. Claus

Dear Frau Klaus,

I loved impersonating Herr Klaus along with 450 LBS'ers at the annual Santa Pub Crawl. I received your Christmas card in the mail. You looked fab (and did you lose some weight or what, yowza?). Anyhoo, was hoping you could put in a plug for me with Herr K.

Really, all I want for Christmas is my two front teeth. That and I was so hoping you could influence Herr Klaus to bring goodwill to LBS with a revoke of this infernal "attendance policy" which requires tuition-payers to show up for every lecture with freshly scrubbed pink faces, which kinda sucks given that my face is kinda brown and stuff! On the plus side I like this newfound bonhomie with my fellow LBS'ers. More of that please!

I'd love an I-banking internship, and if Amnesty International stood up for I-banks. Smaller bonuses for the long hours and the type of work definitely classifies as human rights violation.

About my friends and family -- could you have Herr K. do right by my peeps? They are fantastic folks and I love them! No lumps of coal please!

Please wave a wand and help me eliminate the word "change" from my lexicon and help me start living it. Also, please help me slay the Facebook monster!

Also, for Allah's sake, please help the people who got conned into thinking that Slumdog Millionaire was the shiznit -- it wasn't that cool! Its like after the film producers shot the first 30 minutes, they said, "Aaah, screw this! We'll stop making a fantastic edgy gritty Indian version of Cidade de Deus and turn this movie into a sappy dramatic Bollywood gangsta tear-jerker (just like the 500,000 other Bollywood movies with similar plotlines)". I spent five summers in my teens working in the slums of Bombay and while the first 20 minutes of the film reflect reality, the rest of it is synthetic bullshit and for Krishner's sake, half the scenes were not shot in Bombay! And Bombay cops are not ruthless bastards, as depicted in the movie (although I once literally did have my ass handed to me on a platter right after a riot – a journalist's privilege). I hate the mofos who think they know anything about India - who think they can take gritty reality and misery, amp it up, "shoot it, can it", graft it onto sappy visceral high shock-value watered-down Bollywood bullshit and then shamelessly peddle it to a bunch of gullible goras - just to draw a few gasps in a movie theatre! Don't be exploitin' and misrepresentin' -- unless your name is Merchant or Ivory or Gurinder Chaddha or Mira Nair. Felt cathartic to upchuck that bile!

But aside from all of this, I wish that oh nine would lead to people around the world being more cool and groovy, and less prone to aggression, that banks were vilified no more, that Coldplay released a new album, that Oxfam and Make Trade Fair did well, and that people did more for those who didn't have much!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, Frau Klaus!

- XXO