Knicq

Introducing Saab, the man not the auto-maker, and the Japanese auto-makers’ Conspiracy.
knicq posted in Jalali Baba, Knicqisms on February 10th, 2007

Jalali Baba is eccentric, Chillate is chilled (and bitter), Aamir Zaki’s Signature is brilliant, Hot cakes sell like Toyotas; and I am full of facts, no one is interested in. I am also full of posts no-one offers to put up for me. Jalali Baba has accused me of being full of certain other organic compounds, but we have a difference of opinion there. That is saying a lot about how strongly I feel about the subject, since I am not one to differ with my own spiritual misguide on matters less important than life and death. If there is one person who can actually afford to entertain a difference of opinion with Jalali Baba, it is Saab; and I am not Saab. Saab is hardly spiritual. Saab is absolutely misguided, hence the difference of opinion with Jalali Baba.

Opinion is a strange thing. It hardly matters what it is, until there is one that differs from it. Jalali Baba is aware that his opinion is thus lent added credibility when Saab commits the blasphemy of differing form it; and this is perhaps why Jalali Baba bears with Saab’s incredible incredulity. Saab’s disagreement proves little else than the vanity of an assumption that Jalali Baba’s opinion can be the subject of any skepticism at all. Vanity is a sin. Saab will rot in hell, and so will his assumptions.

Backaches are spiritual equivalents of physical nirvana. There is as much spiritual about backaches as there is physical about nirvana. It is another one of those facts no-one is interested in. No-one except Saab of course. Saab indulges with backaches; he entertains them, tames them, pampers them and looks forward to them. They afford him an opportunity to lie on his aching back, and contemplate less the fate of a world plagued by indifference to him and infested with Jalali Baba’s disciples. Saab sees me where he goes. It is primarily because I go where he goes, but there could be other reasons too; reasons only Saab and his psychiatrist can uncover through dedicated and long sessions that cost Saab a fortune.

I worry about Saab. Saab worries about the world, and its fate; until backache sets in. Then he worries about having to get well, and having to drive one of the Toyotas or the Hondas, the kindly Al Futtaims have imported into the UAE with the sole purpose of keeping the orthopedics busy. Did I not mention a conspiracy by the Toyotas, Hondas, Mitsubishis, Mazdas and the like? Turns out the conspiracy is hatched not only by the car manufacturers but also by their agents across the country. The Futtaims have joined hands with the Toyota and Honda chaps, while the Habtoors and Galadaris are in cahoots with Mitsubishi and Mazda respectively. Saab is aware of this elaborate conspiracy too, and much like yours truly, a victim of it as well. It is a conspiracy to exploit the orthopedics, and to give them bad backs through long hours. Perhaps there is a certain wisdom in it all, how can they hope to actually treat a pain they have not personally experienced? One feels though, and one is not being a complete fool here, that the Futtaims, Habtoors and the Galadaris have allowed passion and overzealous attempts at forcing empathy to interfere with their ambitious drive towards fulfilling their obligations towards bringing about an excellence in the medical fraternity that is borne out of nothing less than personal exposure to misery.

Its all very well being passionate and overzealous about the whole “medical excellence through personal exposure to misery” philosophy, until one, or as is the case here, a handful of chaps decide to cause the misery that the medical fraternity must be exposed to.

I realize that I have omitted a few important facts that are central to ensuring that the pieces fall into place magically, so here goes:

Long ago, Saab and I had an opportunity to evaluate the facts that were available to us, which were limited in number, but convincing enough in the empirical evidence they provided through sheer pain. The facts were thus: Saab had a Toyota, I had a Honda; Saab developed a bad back, I developed a bad back; Saab shifted to a German car, and I to a Korean car that had recently acquired American nationality; Saab’s backaches vanished, mine evaporated; I reverted to a Toyota, and the backaches struck with a vengeance; Saab stayed wiser than I for sometime, and then fell to the temptation of a Toyota A/C - he slept with a runny nose, thanks to the magical air conditioning; and woke up with an enhanced sensation of having a back, and an aching back at that, thanks to the Toyota seats. We put two and two together, and then we put the rest of the facts together, and got to the conclusion that the Japanese cars had excellent air-conditioning and fuel economy, and extremely non-ergonomic seating systems, if they had a semblance of a system in their seats that is; the only thing systematic about those seats is the pain they cause.

Yours truly was the first one to hazard a guess as to what was amiss where, which in one word was: comfort and consideration for the “sitter”. Not one word you say, ask George W. Bush. He has often used such one words. A guy who can go about destroying countries, and killing people not only with impunity, but also with the support of an Oxford educated pet, ought to know a thing or two about the correct usage of the queen’s language. Saab was more adventurous with his take on the facts, and he felt that it were the Toyota/Mazda guys trying to deliberately give us all bad backs, so when the Japs launched their world-wide campaign to retake the world through military forays, we would be in no position to lift our guns and march. It turned out later that the Japanese actually offered the agents the option of choosing what seats would be installed in the cars that would be sent to their territories, and that it were actually the agents that were asking for these backache causing seats.

This was baffling; why would they want to give us, their own people, bad backs? It was at this point that one was reminded of the golden rule about assumption, which was that one must assume the best on another’s part, until there was reason to assume otherwise. One is not always a fool; so we tried to assume the best on the agents’ part; and the only plausible explanation was that the agents want us all to have bad backs so that the orthopedics are kept busy, and since there are so many of these Japanese cars around, it was apparent that the agents did not just want the Orthopedics busy, they wanted them terribly busy, busy enough to give them bad backs. Working with the golden rule again, we got to the conclusion that they wanted the Orthopedics to have badbacks so that they could experience first hand the pain they had to treat, and at this point it all fell in place - magically or not.