JACKASS OF ALL TRADES

You may often see him standing on his head perfecting his 'Yoga', while reading a manual on Pranik Healing and listening to an audiotape on 'Ozone Therapy.' One of the prime specimens of of social omnivores with his finger in every pie, he bites off more than what he can chew only to go belly up in the end. His multifarious pursuits are rooted in a yearning to be a cynosure of all eyes.


A chronic gate-crasher at public functions, he heckles the speakers with long-winded questions. And before long, he may, for the love of mike, hijack the podium, shedding the light of erudition thereby administering general anaesthesia to the captive audience. What he lacks in depth, he doles out in length, never failing to convince the audience that the best thing they can do is to dive for the nearest exit and take a powder.


You may have to keep a stiff upper lip when he opens his ever-ready melodious jaw to chip in with a song or two from his repertoire. And if push comes to shove, don't push your luck. Sing 'Adieu' at the top of your voice and vamoose.

Like Mary's lamb, he tags along behind dignitaries just when they light lamps or cut ribbons hoping to get on camera en route for the newspaper pages or TV screens. The story goes that one such bloke jumped the queue in order to be seen with a VIP as the latter was about to alight from an aircraft. Anxious to get into the foreground, the man stepped out of the plane ahead of the celebrity only to go into a free fall and land on the tarmac since the aircraft ladder had not yet been put in place. And he certainly made it to the front pages of major dailies, albeit gift-wrapped in a plaster cast!

Then there was this young man to whom someone hinted that, seen from some remote angle, he looked like a spitting image of a famous film hero. So off he went to the tinsel town. And he got a break; but all he did in that film was to play the role of a long-dead ancestor of the of the Hero, smiling benevolently through the frame of his garlanded photograph hung on the wall

In his second attempt, he was rumoured to have gotten a role of some substance. So, during the film's premiere, his friends thronged the theatre hoping to watch their budding star in action. When he didn't materialise on the screen till the climax in which the film's hero died, the never-say-die friends hoped against hope that he would at least appear as a pallbearer. But, alas, the local hero himself had died on the editing table!

Image Courtesy: http://www.rare-extreme.com/

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