The bird flew - A true story.

Dedication: This post is dedicated to the millions of chickens that were culled over the last few days. Had this not happened they could have lived to see the special screening of ‘Rang De Basanti’ that is being organized exclusively for Maneka Gandhi and her animal friends. May their eternal soul rest in pieces.

HIV is out – avian flu is in. The ‘country’ is going to dogs. Earlier, they were asking us to avoid contact with women. Now, they are asking us to avoid contact with chickens!! Which means all those strange pictures in public toilets and city buses will soon feature broiler chickens instead of sultry women. A thought which makes us all shudder.

While experts have been desperately trying to ascertain the source of the outbreak, some believe ‘serial kisser’ turned actor, Emraan ‘I-am-the-man’ Hashmi to be a likely cause of the epidemic. Mr. Rajat Trivedi, joint director, department of animal husbandry said that there is no reason not to believe that Emraan didn’t do it. “He has a history with the chicks” Mr. Trivedi said. When questioned about the allegations, Emraan dismissed them as plain rumor, innuendo and gossip. He asserted that he is a person of morality, character, integrity, honesty, responsibility, spirituality, truth, ethics…Hey, is everybody getting the point here ? So many values, blink blink…Lets move on.

However, as a precautionary measure in the “interest of the people”, the Delhi High Court has ordered to seize the actor’s passport and quarantine him for a few days. Which means Indian cinema is likely to go back by at least thirty years to the days where only villains had the authority to have sex on screen and the idea of a hero was to sing songs at the heroine by maintaining a distance of at least 10 feet. As a direct consequence of this, over thirty four people were killed and thousands injured owing to severe mass protests and subsequent pelting of stones by Hashmi fans in northern Nigeria. Here, the readers must note that Nigeria has a vast market for Emraan’s films. The enormous success in the region is attibuted to Emraan's playback singer Himesh Reshmmiya whose blockbuster single “oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo” is a major hit with the local tribes. They watch film after film for this beautifully composed masterpiece and you can even see them humming the tune on their hunting expeditions.

Back home, we must admit a kind of gloom has crept up all over and a sense of trepidation about the future has suddenly been magnified. Survivalists have been stocking up on masala papads and batata vadas hoping to stay alive until the next Valentine’s Day. Karan Singhania, a renowned industrialist cannot serve chicken at the party he is throwing to celebrate his son’s return from boarding school for the summer holidays. The industrialist who recently became the world’s biggest producer of quality toilet paper is dejected and hopes to make up by serving venison and has hired master nimrod Salman Khan to do the hunting job for him. Salman is reported to have been paid a whopping five lakh rupees and a years supply of Singhania toilet paper as advance, an amount which none of his films has grossed over the last ten years. And for the first time in the last twenty three years, the author’s mother refused to serve him chicken for dinner yesterday  As a side note I’d like to mention that poultry farmers and restaurant owners seem to be concerned too.

As responsible sons (and daughters) of this soil, what can we software engineers do to curb this menace apart from forwarding this meaningless nonsense to other software engineers? Simple. Let’s wait for Microsoft to release a patch for the virus instead of simply 'chickening' out. Ha ha ha… (Sorry, bad joke)