Fast tips to being a celebrity

Anna Hazare, the name that launched millions FB updates and thousands of celebrity tweets (not to be confused with the similar sounding ‘twits’), and whose deceptive spelling had the Western media imagining a lady named Anna with the impossible second name Hazare, has launched more than the Jan Lokpal movement. His unprecedented and unexpected success in creating mass and upper class hysteria, had Baba (a word inspired by the sound a sheep makes in the classic nursery rhyme), Ramdev (ram meaning male sheep, which explains the prefix baba), in contortions.

Flashback.

Baba: Here I am, getting up every morning at four and twisting my body into impossible shapes to get the attention of the nation, teaching the world to breathe and using desperate measures like declaring homosexuality to be a disease to get my face (yes, somewhere he has a face in that mass of tangled hair) in the news, and there comes an old man from a village and pulls the yoga mat from under my posture! Why, I even tried hitching my slow wagon to his fast train, but no, he continued to hog the limelight. Ram, ram, ram! (Said to rhyme with damn, damn, damn.) He even had all kinds of people wearing Anna cap (formerly known as the Gandhi cap), with the slogan, “Mai Anna Hazare” and marching up and down streets with candles as if there was a power outage in the city. But finally, there is some relief. As the saying goes, ‘Bhagwan ke ghar mein der hain, andher nahin’ (loosely translated, ‘There is delay in god’s house, not darkness’. With every religion having a ritual of lighting lamps, candles etc. but obviously there is no darkness.) The process of formulating the Lokpal Bill is all tangled up like a novice yoga practitioner attempting one of my asanas– what do you expect with me adding my two bits to it? But it is not enough! Anna might come before Baba, alphabetically speaking, but as the other saying goes, ‘Der aaye, durust aaye’, (loose translation – Came late, came correct), my time has to come. I have to make it come.

Saying this Baba did rapid breathing movements that created the effect of him being hit in the belly by rapid Tyson punches. This removal of hot air from his body calmed Baba somewhat. He decided to pray and began chanting, “Baba black sheep have you any fool?” until he reached a state of meditation where just one word remained in his consciousness – Black. Exhausted, he scratched his left ear with his left toe and exclaimed, “Black! That’s it! Anna, this will make you feel sheepish!”

The next moment he called a press conference (defined as the conference you get when you press the right buttons), and announced:

“Unless and until the government forms a committee (with me in it), to get all the black money stashed abroad, I will fast unto death!” Of course, he didn’t specify whose death. And as the cameras flashed and TV reporters thrust their microphones into his beard, he said to himself, ‘Just wait Anna. The day is not far when everyone from Rahul Bose to Priyanka Chopra will sport a beard like me with a tattoo on their foreheads – Mai Baba Ramdev’.

Breaking news – In a midnight operation, Baba and his followers were evicted by the police from the Ramlila Grounds. Baba escaped by jumping into the women’s section – but naturally, he doesn’t suffer from that disease called homosexuality. A Page 3 reporter spoke to one of his followers after the incident:

Page 3 reporter: Does Baba have a squint?

Follower: No, he just has one eye on the cameras.