The Leaf Blower and the Witch

This morning a few colleagues from office and I were grabbing a quick smoke at the smoke station outside the office premises, while a leaf blower was doing his stuff blowing leaves with a leaf blower all over the place.

Note to self -
Why doesn't a leaf blower have a formal name for his profession? You call the massage dude /dudette a masseur / masseuse, why don't we call the leaf blower a blowsseur or blowsseuse?


The leaf blower was going about doing his job as he must usually but he had five desi voyeurs to deal with. Yeah we desis can be very disgusting when we decide to drop every other thought from our mind and concentrate all our attention on an honest man trying to make a living in the middle of the day. Takes me back to an occasion during my university days when a high speed motorbike whizzed past on the street with a guy and a gal riding on it. The bike was not a ducati, the guy was no hunk and the gal was no chick. It was a creaky yamaha rx 500, the guy had worn a netted banyan and had a mole on his face - probably a butcher from Chapel Road and the gal (the less said the better about her). The point is ten or so desi teens dropped their jaws and cranked up their necks to follow the bike with their gaze till the time it was visible. The panwalah, maalish walah, ear cleaning walah and every other walah followed suit. In a matter of minutes the entire nation was looking in the direction of the biker, so much mental telepathy caused the magnetic field over the country to go bonkers (The high tide talk is plain bull!). Apart from the 10 over sexed desi teens, no one had any idea what they were looking at.

Note to self -
1 - The guy on the bike was probably Rajnikanth in disguise. He probably subliminally hypnotized everyone to concentrate on the mole on his face. I have no other explanation of the continual mass hysteria over him.

2 - Talking of netted banyans: "Life mein aaraam ho toh ideas aate hain" (Punch line of Dollar underwear and banyan).

Back to the leaf blower. With 5 desis shamelessly starting him down I can only wonder what he was thinking at that point. Maybe he thought about blowing all the leaves on us and going 'Who the fuck you lookin' at?' Or maybe he'd aim the blower at us and blow our cigarettes away'. Bad ideas, both of them. If he carried out plan A, the five desis would have taken the rest of the day off citing unsolicited blowing. If he carried out plan B, he would learn the most swear words in a foreign language ever learnt by an American in a day.

Note to self -
This is not a place to reveal my excuses for taking days off work.

My mind wandered to why the leaf blowing thingie should not be outsourced to desis. In a second, rather less than a second, better in nanoseconds I knew why this would be a bad idea. It's got to do with our inherent nature -

1 - We'd blow more leaves on the parking lot than away from it; never underestimate the flow of emotion of a desi in a foreign land with a foreign object in his hand (ever seen us playing in snow for the first time?)

2 - We'd alter our resume to say we managed and operated a biohazard plant when all we did was blow. It's a habit that never goes, we love lying in black letters on white paper.

3 - The blower would be found in every desi home on weekends for blowing leaves that don't exist; borrowing stuff we don't need to never use is a genetic pastime. OK, I won't be so harsh, we'd probably mess our carpets with leaves on purpose just to blow them out.

4 - The blower would be used in desi weddings to shower flowers on everyone. Again a genetic habit, we love employing office stuff for personal use. A more aggressive baaraat would employ it to propel sutli bombs in the air while the saat pheras were in progress. An enterprising gujju would even probably paint it and rent it out on weddings and other occasions.

Coming back to reality, my mind wandered to less insane thoughts - how can the whole process be optimized? Blowing leaves from here to there might be fun, but it sure ain't pretty. Here's a list of probable solutions I propose -

1 - Scientists, G-8 countries and hollywood all seem to have a pretty good nexus with aliens. They could convince aliens to descend on earth and pull all the leaves up the spaceship. (Imagine a dhatura claiming bragging rights over all other trees stating- 'I was abducted by an alien spaceship').

Anyway, I propose the following ideas to seduce the aliens for this task -
a - Natasha Henstridge tapes from Species and Species II
b - Dennis Rodman. No tapes needed, one glance is all it will take.
c - Hrithik Roshan. His extra thumb could be used as a negotiating tool.
May be a bad idea in hindsight; don't want to give papa Roshan ideas
for more shitty stuff.

2 - The leaves could be transported to Lady Gaga for her next outfit. If she can wear a meat outfit, she can certainly wear leaves. Or knowing her, she would only wear 'a' leaf, or three. Best case four.
But we'll still let the idea stand. If the number of leaves in the outfit increases, we'll drop it.

3 - Hire Christine O'Donnell to clean up the mess. If she's a witch, she'll blow out the leaves with just her breath and fly off on the leaf blower. A secret camera can be attached to the leaf blower to give us an insight into what she really thinks about masturbation. It's a win-win situation. If she's a witch the leaves will go, if not we'll get more free prime-time entertainment.
Either way, she's not winning the election. On second thought she just might, it's Halloween time; peak witch-activity season.

If all plans fail, someone go find that broom Arnold Schwarzenegger used in his election campaign for the Gubernatorial election of California and put it to some use.