Registered with the Registrar of Newspapers for India under R.N.I 53640/91

Vol. XXVII No. 9, August 16-31, 2017

Short ‘N’ Snappy

MMM

Messages for massage

IMG_3347 greyscale copy copy

As he gets older, The Man from Madras Musings has several parts of his body craving for attention. The lower back has sunk low in terms of its ability to hold up, and as for his left knee, there are certain sounds emanating from it that would not be out of place in a metal-forming workshop. The right foot has days when it becomes very communicative and, of late, is engaging in a conversation of sorts with the left elbow. There are times when the general noise level rises to an extent that MMM gets the idea that he is eavesdropping on a group discussion among body parts.

MMM’s good lady, also known as She Who Must Be Obeyed decreed that a good massage would set all of this right and, so, of late, MMM, whose private life, he will let you know, is an open book, has a burly masseur coming home to knead, rotate, pummel, etc. All of this has MMM feeling as though he has emerged from a boxing bout with Mohammed Ali, but it does help all the talkative body parts quieten down a little. Call it coincidence or whatever, but massaging as a service appears to be going through a boom even as MMM takes his first steps in it. And some of these services appear to be offering a lot more than a massage, in this holy land of Chennai that was once Madras. How else do you explain this epistle that keeps coming up on MMM’s cell phone at least once a day?

“£~¤Summer Offer! B-o-d-y m-a-s-s-a-g-e Starts from 1299/-
Kerala,Thai,Swedish done by Best Offer in 4in1 combo package”

MMM would like to know why the words bodymassage are stretched out like that. Is it a visual depiction of what happens to your tissues? And what is a 4in1 combo package when only three, namely Kerala, Thai and Swedish are mentioned? What is the fourth service offered? Above all, what is the pound symbol doing upfront? Is that the currency in which you are charged?

The pound is not the only one. You also have this, liberally festooned with Euros:
“BODY MASSAG€ Starts from 1499/ K€rala, Thai, Sw€dish massag€s don€ B€st Offer in 4 in 1 combo packag€”

And once again you have a 4in1 service that has only three massage styles on offer.
The following one is more graphic:

“Body massage offer for u Relaxation only Dry Massage @ Rs-999 OIL massage @ Rs-1999 Done By 2 female Therapist (South & North)”.

Now when they say the ‘two female therapist’ are south and north do they refer to the extremities of your body or the regions from which these women come from? But at least the charges are clearly in rupees.
And, lastly, you have this:

~Massage~in#Kilpauk# offer… Relax* your* Mind&Body ~Massage~offer..Oil, Thai, Swedish, Deep Tissue , Balinese, Tigger Point

And so it appears that the fourth style is Balinese. MMM wonders if the masseurs and masseuses dress up in floral skirts and wear hibiscus garlands. As to what is Tigger Point, MMM does not know. Perhaps it has something to do with Winnie The Pooh. Whatever be the service offered, there is no denying that the imagination boggles at all of these. Who said Chennai is not exciting? You just need to press it here and there for rich dividends.

Great Stress Tax

The Man from Madras Musings usually reserves his photographs for the tailpiece, but the current one deserves a better position and so he is keeping it mid-text. Driving the other day by the Sales Tax offices he was impressed by a black granite signboard that now declared the new name of the building to be GST Bhavan. The Tamil translation of the word ‘goods’ in GST, this being Goods and Services Tax, intrigued MMM, for it was sarakku, which, while being the correct equivalent, also colloquially stands for the spirit that cheers. And then MMM realised that this was not so inappropriate after all, for the terms and conditions concerning GST are so confusing that it would be no surprise if those impacted by this tax take to the bottle in increasing numbers.

From what MMM can see, Chennai is now divided into three classes – those that talk about GST but probably don’t pay any, those that pay GST, and those who could not care less. The political class comes in the first lot, the vast middle class in the second. The third is truly democratic, for it involves the uber rich and the stony broke. Neither class is in anyway bothered by GST.

But what interested MMM the most was the way the tailoring class of Chennai objected to this tax. And by these MMM does not mean those small hole-in-the-corner garret tailors who spend the whole day poring over a sewing machine.

He is speaking of those up-market boutiques that managed to get by all these days by collecting money in cash for services rendered by way of bespoke suits and designer dresses. Billing was almost never done, it transpires, the money collected making it directly to the bank with receipts being issued on slips of paper. These cash-and-carry enterprises have finally woken up to the horrors of being taxed. They could do with a few stiff helpings of the sarakku described above.

On Ma & Pa

The Man from Madras Musings, as several of you who read this column know, spent his formative years in the second city of the Empire, viz Calcutta that is Kolkata. Consequently, during the years that he was a cherubic child of Calcutta (CCC), the way the local lingo developed in Madras that is Chennai was quite a closed book to him. In later years, when he became an mmm (mere man of Madras) he took to observing the changes and found that the suffixes ma and pa had replaced the usual da and di with which people addressed contemporaries and juniors. And what’s more, the term ma was used when men spoke to each other and pa was used by the women. The etymology of these two modes of address has long remained a mystery to MMM. Do you readers have any clues, ma? No pa, it does not matter if you don’t.

Please follow and like us:
Pin Share

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Stay Updated