On Cheeniya's Legs -- The Long and the Short of the Matter

My dear OJ
Worries me too you know. I have always prided myself as a person who can handle his English reasonably well. It is not that I am incapable of committing a faux pas. I am quite capable there and particularly during my student days, I have earned even a nickname for it as ‘faux pas cheeniya’! But after reading this exclusive thread of yours, I am worried if I am back to my days of committing glorious faux pas. ‘Pulling someone’s leg’ is not classified as a crime in the Penal Code of any country that I am aware of. Of course, I am totally in the dark about countries like Concordia and the like whose names are mentioned only as postscript in the UN attendance register. Remember that classic Peter Ustinov movie ‘Romanoff and Juliet’ in which he figures as the Chief of Concordia?

Coming back to the point, when I read that I had ‘accused’ you of pulling my leg, my mind went into an awful spin. Nobody accuses anyone of pulling a leg since this particular activity is done in great camaraderie usually. To make my point clearer, I’ll give you a small example. Gandhiji is in the thick of freedom struggle and one fine morning in order to give further pep to his struggle, he announces boycott of ‘videshi’ goods. Immediately the whole country rises in support and consigns all their videshi possessions to fire. Chacha Nehru leads this movement in his favourite locality in Allahabad. There he observes a young chap consigning to flame his brand new videshi shirt which his uncle had brought from London only a week earlier. Chacha Nehru is very impressed. He goes to the youngster, pats him on the back and tells him that he sees all the markings of Gandhiji in him and he is certain that someday, he, that is the youngster, would take over the freedom struggle from Gandhiji and lead it. Now, what will be the reaction of the youngster? He’ll of course tell Chacha Nehru, ‘Chachaji, please don’t pull my leg’. Will Nehru rush to his desk and shoot off a letter to his daughter Indira Priyadarshini saying that he has been accused of leg pulling by a youngster?

I am giving this example only to emphasise on the need to declassify ‘leg pulling’ from the list of activities that come under the ambit of being accused of. There is otherwise no direct link to any of the dramatic personae of my example to the current subject. So don’t start asking me who is Gandhiji here and who is Chacha Nehru etc.

Coming to the Guinness guys, I was mentioning about the kind of inconvenient details they used to seek before declaring a winner some two decades back. I had some personal knowledge of this as a guy close to the place where I was working had claimed their attention for the longest moustache he had. The whole lot of them descended on the tiny village and pulled every hair of his moustache to make sure it was genuine. It is possible that they ask for PAN card etc nowadays to make sure that the claimant is not a ‘benami’ for an upcoming politician.

That’s pretty decent of you to dedicate your creation that was meant for your grandchild to a grandpa. As long as both are ‘grand’ how does it matter to whom it goes to? And talking of Chettinad, I must tell you that Chettinad is famous for not singing but for totally a different kind of oral activity which is eating. Their cuisine has acquired such fame that there are at least a thousand of them in Chennai! So no ‘Tana’s there but only ‘khana’!

Incidentally Laurel and Hardy fought in films only to make their fans laugh. Otherwise they were the best of buddies. Do you know that Laurel never performed after Hardy’s death despite getting lucrative offers from producers of repute?
Sri