How do you solve a ‘poblem’ like Zubri Khan ?

Recent ‘happenings’ had made me solemnly vow to myself that I would not do this dude a favour and write him a blog (can you believe that people actually request me to blog on them nowadays?!!!!) But then again, if you’ve read any of my older blogs, I’m sure you’d agree with me that the best revenge possible would be for me to finish my blog on him and publish it as soon as possible and make it as long as possible while I’m at it. The ‘happenings’ in question are thus –

Nishant recently hosted a swell party at this swanky restaurant in Koramangala. He’d invited most of his engineering classmates including yours truly (and the missus) and Mr. Zubri Khan. While attempting to make polite conversation with him, Mrs. Pollo was able to sense that something was afoot in his life that concerned his marriage. A little poking and prodding revealed that ‘things’ were indeed afoot and in ‘that’ general direction but ‘things’ weren’t fully confirmed as yet. Employing techniques borrowed from Freudian methods of psycho-analysis, we then proceeded to ‘extract’ some information about what was indeed ‘confirmed’, because by his own admission, some of it was yet ‘not fully confirmed’. It was then that Zubair, suffering from a mild panic attack combined with the claustrophobic effect that Mrs. Pollo and her fellow interrogators were having on him, let it slip that the only things confirmed were the girl, the venue and the date of the marriage and that he had nothing to do with any robberies which happened in March in Jayanagar, that he didn’t know Mr. Ramalingaraju personally and that he’d never in his life heard of the Dandupalya Gang :D … Well, knowing Zubair all these years, we let this unexpected torrent of completely unrelated information slide right by, as the guy sometimes says things which nobody in their right senses would, when in a tight spot … and boy was he in a real tight spot this time. If we might analyse the information that Mr. Khan was so kind to ‘give’ us, we might realize that there was indeed a lot of ‘unconfirmed things’ in his journey towards marital bliss. Some of those ‘things’ (not necessarily in the ascending or descending order of the degree of their importance or chronology) are as follows –

1) The names of all of his seven kids
2) The venue of the ‘rite of passage’ of his sons (of ‘fore’most importance if you ask me … people who find this distasteful may ‘skin’ me alive)
3) The department store from which to procure his first rubber-latex contraceptive sheath before indulging in conjugation (if you’re like me, I’m sure you couldn’t say words like ‘conjugation’ or ‘mensuration’ out loud in Maths class without blushing)
4) The room number of the honeymoon suite in a hotel in Madagascar which had to preferably contain the last two digits of the the 10th root of the 56th largest prime number

All said and done, the dude promptly went and got himself engaged to the girl a couple of days after the said interrogation happened ... and didn't call any of us ... can you believe that ?!!!! @%$#$

When Zubair took me aside once, and asked me how my blog on him was shaping up, the term ‘asking for it’ came to mind. We can’t really blame the guy for this apparent lack of judgement on his part, because, some people like Mr. Maney swear to this day that my blog was the acid test for his wife when it came to her choosing him as her life partner. But then again, it’s Zubri that we’re talking about here and he’s ‘asked for it’ pretty much for as long as we’ve known him. Now that he’s on the verge of getting hitched, he believes in all earnestness that a few words penned by yours truly would be just the icing on the cake to make the girl (now that we’ve conclusively established that there is indeed a girl and he's even engaged to her for crying out loud) fall head over heels in love with him. People like Mr. Pereira would argue otherwise however, as was obvious from his wife’s conspicuous absence at a recent party that happened shortly after my blog on him was released.

Mr. Zubri Khan, loveable ol’ fool that he is, more often than not provided that little bit of entertainment that brightened up our days back in engineering college, with his ‘unique’ pronunciation, his timeless quips (‘timeless’ as in ‘with an utter lack of timing’ and not ‘classic’:D ) and numerous other things which most people would simply attribute to his simply being at the wrong place at the wrong time (but which we all found incredibly amusing nonetheless) … Read on …

If you’ve seen the old classic musical – ‘The Sound Of Music’, you’d be familiar with the song that goes –

“How do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
How do you find a word that means Maria?
A flibbertijibbet! A will-o'-the wisp! A clown!” ...

Well, if Zubair attempted to sing this song, it’d come out something like –

“ ‘Ow do you ‘saalv’ eh poblem like Mawiaaaah?
‘Ow do you catch eh cwouud and pin it doun ?
‘Ow do you fiend eh word that means Mawiaaaah?
Eh fwiberpibibbep! Eh wiwowawisp ! Eh Cwoun!” ...

How is this relevant to how we all know (and love) Zubair, you may ask. You really have to ‘hear’ it to believe it. Some people might argue with me here that his pronunciation isn’t as bad as it’s being portrayed to be and the above example is an over-exaggeration (Mr. Pereira, for instance keeps insisting that the only thing is didn't exaggerate was 8 inches long) of fact. But take it from somebody who’s known him for as long as I have, it’s more fun this way! The years in engineering college were full of ‘poblems’ galore, ‘wallies’ (rallies) gone bad, ‘helicafters’ and what not!!

The first time that we saw the scrawny little guy on campus was way after we all joined the first term for the ‘tronics course. He’d joined UVCE from another institution through an exchange programme, some time in the middle of the term and arrived at the motorcycle parking lot one morning on his scooty. I still remember the very first jab (the first of hundreds that would follow) that I made at him about his scooty (since I had a way more masculine ‘Kinetic Honda’ - or so I sincerely believed - back then :D ) which was met with the same blank smile that you’d get from him if you stabbed him with a knife and stood there pushing it further in, looking elsewhere and whistling to show him that you weren’t the one doing it.

We referred to the dude by a myriad of names during Engineering ranging from – Zubri, Zubri Khan, Zoober Man and so on, but the name that really caught on was the name that he’s most famously known by within our circle … Sound the trumpets … ‘Pubair’!! (This name is to be pronounced so that the first part rhymes with ‘tube’ and the second part with ‘hair’)

Some of you must be curious now about the origins of this rather innocent sounding name and some others amongst you must also be wondering what all the fanfare and hoopla is all about as the name doesn’t even sound creative for a nickname. It merely appears to be an innocuous nickname that’s derived by simply replacing the first letter of a person's name with a ‘P’ so that a name like ‘Manju’ becomes ‘Panju’ or a ‘Harsha’ becomes ‘Parsha’. These names, being completely 'unfunny' aside, hardly even make sense. But do bear with me, for all shall be clear as crystal very shortly.

It was a few days after the ominous meeting in the parking lot where Zubair and I got off completely on the wrong foot, when we were all sitting in class, maths class to be precise. It was like any other maths class where our Prof., HP, went on and on in that monotonous drone that she considered her ‘teaching voice’. While some students were completely enthralled by her teaching (and some other sick first benchers, by her), some other of us couldn’t wait for that loose piece of plaster on the ceiling above the teachers’ stage to fall on her head and rid us of the trauma we associated with maths class and HP once and for all. She seemed to be able to read our minds (or maybe it was the placards that some of us were holding up), for she once announced in class that all those of us who were pathologically uninterested in what transpired during maths class and would be happier catching dangerous nameless diseases in the canteen (from eating … what were you thinking?), could walk out of class now and never have to worry about attendance … ever. No sooner than she had uttered the last word of that magical sentence, had the last of us dudes disappeared from Maths class, never to return. That was much later, however, than the incident that I am about to recount ...

Maths class had always been the venue of some really remarkable, serendipitous discoveries. It was here that we all discovered the joys associated with the Binomial theorem, the Fourier Series, Legendre Polynomials, Laplace transforms and much much more. Many of the distinguished denizens of the last benches however, also discovered many other things which were equally serendipitous and equally joyous and almost invariably always in Maths class much to HP’s chagrin. Some of the most important discoveries made in the order of their importance are as follows -

1) Katthe discovered that there was life on Manju’s back.
2) Mr. Maney and I discovered that Harsha could talk after rejecting Mr. Betgeri’s theory that it was his mustache which was alive and which could converse in five different languages
3) Mr. ‘Yellow coat’ a.k.a ‘The dude with caliber’ a.k.a ‘My best enemy’ discovered the joys of porn and the eleventh commandment
4) Mr. Betgeri discovered that Kulfi II could say – “Go F*** yourself” in Marathi

But, by far the most remarkable discovery was made by yours truly, one afternoon, during a particularly boring session …

The ceiling fan was grunting away and so was HP. Everybody seemed to be particularly fascinated by the day’s class. There was something about the perfume that HP was wearing that day because every single person in the first ten rows seemed to be in rapt attention of every syllable that she was uttering. Even Harsha and Nishant seemed to be taking notes and I was slowly but surely dying of boredom.

That was when I saw ‘it’. Math’s class had helped me hone my ESP to a level where I could now see reality in terms of streaming bits of information rather than what the machines wanted us to see. I had also realized one day sitting in the canteen that the truth was that ‘there was no spoon’ and we had to use our hands to eat... Now as I sat in Maths class, I saw it first through the corner of my eye ...

That head ... that head, that was attached to the body that sat on the bench in front of mine ... it reminded me of something ... something very familiar, yet something that I was unable to put my finger on ... the answer eluded me ... like it did a desperate Greek God trying to find the fountain of youth hidden deep amidst the black, forbidden forest. Something did not smell right about this. I had to let go ... I had to be one with the Matrix ...

Then ‘it’ hit me ... like a ten rupee note hits someone square between the eyes when he’s least expecting it. Of course I had seen that head before! We all had see that head before sometime or the other but we were too plugged in to be able to see it for what it truly was. I would love to reveal the entire truth behind the glorious vision that we beheld that day in maths class and share the joy we experienced in discovering what it truly was with you, but I’m afraid that the truth would just be too gross to reveal in pub(l)ic ... and trust me when I say that once you realize the truth, you’ll never, I repeat, NEVER, be able to see the guy the same way ever again. How this lead to Zubri coming to be known as ‘Pubair’, well, go figure!

One thing, I’ll grant though is that the dude had an innate understanding of how technology worked. So much so, that most of us (including yours truly as a last resort) would turn to him for help with our computers when all that we could do was, throw our hands up in frustration when the confounded contraptions would refuse to work. When I say that he had an ‘understanding’ of technology, trust me when I say that I’ve often wondered if he could talk to computers of all kinds. I once invited him over to take a look at my PC which had suddenly stopped working after I installed a new nVidia RIVA TNT II card on the motherboard’s AGP port. After the initial exchange of pleasantries when he arrived, I left him alone in my room with my PC only to sneak back and watch him through parted curtains. I swear to you that what I’m about to recount to you is what actually happened that day. He unscrewed the cabinet screws, slid the outer casing off and proceeded to extract the AGP card from its slot on the motherboard. What he did after that however, was straight out of the Twilight Zone, for it appeared to me that he was talking to the card and stroking it the way you would, a very small child. He then bent down and looked into the cabinet, and then appeared to be whispering something into it, after completing which he proceeded to install the card again and screw the cabinet's cover back on. He then called me back into the room, turned the PC’s power back on and Voila! The PC came on and booted up as though there had been absolutely nothing wrong with it. I was astonished, flabbergasted and at a complete loss for words at what had just transpired but I decided to maintain my composure and asked him about how he’d gone about fixing the problem. The dude, merely smiles angelically and says (I kid you not!) – “Sometimes, it takes time for a graphics card, especially AGP graphics accelerators to ‘get used’ to the motherboard. My uncle has a PC assembly business and even he often advises people to give the hardware a few days before it starts working glitch free”. That was when my lower jaw hit the floor and broke the flooring tiles which you can see to this day if you visit my room in our old apartment.

Always the motor sport enthusiast, Zubair once had us convinced for a while, shortly after engineering, that he would be moving to Canada to pursue a career in 'wally cars'. He’d always be the first one to suggest Go-Kart racing when we’d be making plans for an outing ... and to his credit, he was good, really good! He was the first among us to actually drive a car and Zubri, Kulfi, Mr. Betgeri and I would sometimes go out in his Maruti Omni and have a blast. Being an excellent driver, Zubair could always be trusted to drive responsibly even while being a tad aggressive in unruly traffic. The only major accident that he’s ever had that involved a motor vehicle was when he was not the one doing the driving (or riding in this case). The entire gang was one its way to a Dhaba in Marathahalli and as always this meant that there would be a motorcade of around twenty people on ten two-wheelers. Zubair, a rare misjudgement on his part, allowed Kulfi to ride his RX, opting to sit pillion himself. As we saw Kulfi hurtling down airport road at a break-neck velocity, we knew that Zubair had bought himself a date with disaster and our worst fears came horribly, horribly true, for about a kilometer down the road, we saw that an accident had occurred between a car and a motorbike. On getting closer, we realized that the badly mangled bike which lay on the curb was Zubri’s RX and that Kulfi and he had already been taken to the emergency ward at Manipal Hospital as, fortunately, (I know that there’s nothing fortunate about an accident) the accident had occurred right outside the hospital. On reaching the ward, we realized that Kulfi was unscathed but Zubair had been wounded badly on his face, arms and his legs but to our collective relief, had no broken bones or internal injuries. There was a light moment even amidst all that chaos when we learnt that the first words that Zubair uttered when he came to (he’d lost consciousness for a while) were – “How am I going to propose to her now?” He’d been waiting to propose to this girl for a while then and realizing that his face now bore wounds which would leave a scar when they healed, believed that his prospects were completely shattered (How's that for comic relief!). My parents arrived at the hospital a little later and we drove Zubair back home to his family. Being the ever tenacious one, Zubair was able to overcome even this adversity and the wounds miraculously left no scars – on his face or his heart for that matter, for Zubair would now change his outlook towards life and approach each day with renewed zeal. In his own words – “No Poblem!”

His love for technology saw him ride the road to success from one great job to the next and it’s only with stubborn grit, determination and resolve that he finds himself where he is today. So much so, that many people actually consider him to be some sort of guru in Network Technology.

There are some people whom you admire from the first second you meet them. Some, we openly admire, while some others we admire secretly but ridicule in public just because they are sporting enough to take the torrent of taunts that are hurled at them and because admitting that we admired them would tarnish our own ‘cool’ image. Every college and school has both, the cool kids (the ‘clique’ so to speak) and the uncool kids. I’ve been a bit of both in my life. The four years I spent at UVCE are closest to my heart because for the first time in my life, I met people who didn’t judge other people, who didn’t have ‘attitude’ problems, who were humble and down to earth and genuinely good at heart. Zubair has been the butt of all our ribbing and teasing in college but we didn’t hate the guy. Nay! Quite contrary to what our demeanour towards him would suggest, we really liked being in the company of the dude, for after all, can any one of us honestly say that they can think of life in UVCE without Zubair?

All things said and done, there is one undeniable fact about Zubri and that’s the fact that he’s one hell of a friend. Folks who’ve been really close to the dude such as Mr. Betgeri (and even yours truly) can testify that there’s this feeling of warmth exuded by the dude that’s completely real and uninhibited. But Zubri’s the kind of person who can botch up even something even as simple as just ‘being a good friend’. Here’s something that I really have to add … an SMS that many of us received from Zubri on friendship day. Whilst his intentions, I’m sure, were perfectly admirable, considering the fact that most of us stopped sending out ‘happy friendship day’ messages when we turned 13, this did not prevent Zubair from sending one out. The message in case read thus – “Happy friendship day my dear friends! Thank u 4 bein a part of my life!sorry n thanx 4 everythin!God bless u! tc gudmorning :) :)”. Apart from the fact that it sounded (spelled) like it had been forwarded by Katthe (a.k.a. Bharath), to me it sounded like a suicide note :D. To be frank, although I felt really happy that atleast somebody on this God-Forsaken planet had actually thought of me on Friendship day, the SMS did scare me witless.
The reasons were as follows –
1) It sounded kinda final … as in, “sorry and thax 4 everythin!God bless u!
2) It ended with a ‘gudmorning’ with two smiley faces … like it was his sick sadistic way of daring the world to have a nice time after his passing on :D
3) He was thanking you for being a part of his life … (which was soon going to be in the past ? :O )
4) He was sending this SMS to me!!! … Of all people!!! Anybody who knew me and Zubair would know for a fact that the last thing that poor Zubair would want to send me would be a ‘Happy Friendship Day’ SMS after all that I had put the poor soul through, during Engineering ! :D

Since we’re still speaking about Zubri’s botching things up, it would be worthwhile to share one event that is recounted to this day in our circle. We were all sitting in the canteen once and Zubair walks up to us, excited and out of breath, the way you get when you’re really bursting at the seams to share something really ground-breaking (for lack of something better to call it :P ). “Did you people watch the movie on Staav Movies yesterday?” he asks. Some of us who hadn’t, asked him what the name of the movie was. Still out of breath and excited, the dude continues – “It was a gvate movie. Full action. Amazing. You have to see it!”. By now some of us were actually beginning to wonder if we’d missed the movie of the century, the way Zubair was foaming at his mouth. We shouted in unison – “Ok! Tell us the name of the movie! Quick!”. To this Zubair replies – “The movie’s name was Avkon”. This strangely was a movie that we’d never heard about, and trust me, there was some seriously hardcore movie buffs amongst us who’d seen ‘em all even before the rest of us had heard of ‘em. “Avkon?” We asked. “Never heard of it before. Is it a new movie? But, then again, it can’t be that new if it was aired on Star Movies now can it? What’s it about and who’s in it?” Zubair, then says – “It’s about an avoplane getting hijacked by pvisoners who are being tvanspovted fvom one jail to anothev”. It was then that it hit us! The dude had made a monumental boo boo. He'd meant – ‘Air Con’ by which he’d further actually implied – ‘Con Air’. Collective jaw droppings all around and mass ‘faintings’ later, some of the dudes actually chased Zubri around the basketball court for a while before threatening him with dire consequences if he ever dared to set foot in the canteen again.

Studying at UVCE, I’m sure that each and every one of us has amazing memories to reflect upon when in a melancholic mood. I still remember being invited home by Zubri for a feast where I had some of the most amazing Biryanis and non-veg curries that I’ve ever eaten in my life (Note how my fondest memories always involve food. And, of course we were all wondering what he was talking about when he said that the ‘bivyaani’ and ‘kheev’ that his mom made were to die for, when he was inviting us :D. The myriad quaint theories that the guy had about the calculation of the amount of petrol which was needed for a journey from Bangalore to Chennai and back (which for some reason yielded that you’d need twice as much fuel for the return journey than on the onward journey and which was seconded by Mr.Begeri), about techniques of overtaking vehicles on a highway (if you thought that if it took 5 seconds to overtake one ‘lovvy’, it would take 10 seconds to overtake a ‘lovvy’ which was twice as long, think again :D ) and about optimally piling pakodas up, (don’t completely remember this one fully … am offering good money for any dope on this one) have becomes things of legend.

Zubri, you rock dude! You really do! We wouldn’t have liked you any other way … trust me. Thanks for the memories … thanks for everything … thanks for being my friend … Please forgive me for everything … kindly adjusht maadi :D … and do invite me to your wedding when 'everything' is ‘confirmed’.

You have been pooped upon ... Amen!