Let me take you to the new botal. You have seen it, of course, it’s been out there in the open all this time for all to see. Don’t call me a show-off, I spelt out just this last week all the reasons — or many of them — why I should not be called a show-off (although the truth is that is what I am, among many others things that I protest I am not — like, mean, to pick a benign example, I am a transparent person, although that is one thing I am just not). Anyway. I am many things, I am most certainly not what you think I am. Because joo are always wrong and I am always right. Get that?

Okay, now we’re talking. Or, rather, I am talking. Toh suno meri baat… Because you have no option, have you?

Let’s have a drink, mauka hai, dastoor bhi hai, I mean there’s an occasion, and some sort of convention too. New botal. Which you have been seeing for a long time. And wondering. What will happen with new botal? Or what will happen in new botal? New things? Or the same old things? Now is the time to know. Let me take you there. Only I can do that, you know it is my domain. Before this there has been no entry, or limited entry, or entry and then quick closure. We haven’t quite had a measure of the new botal in its entirety just yet.

Now is that time, that historic time, that never-before time, that first-time-ever time, that time of all times that has never presented itself to us ever before because I have not been there to facilitate it. But I am here. The time is here. I will present it to you. The new botal.

Let’s walk towards it from the old botal whose use-before date I decreed done and which will henceforth be expired botal, or some such thing, although we will keep the old botal if only in order to be able to contrast the new botal with it.

Some peepuls have apprehension (mostly misapprehension) about new botal and how it is going to be different from old botal. They ask why the new botal at all when there was old botal already? They don’t want to see the writing on the new botal. But that is a matter of time, old botal is empty now, the new botal has to be embraced. Whatever its contents. Let’s go, what are we waiting here for? To the new botal…!

Remember that time
None of this had begun
I wasn’t here
And maybe you were,
Who knows, I can’t be bothered
And then that night
The night we decanted whine
And uncorked revelry
And began by exclaiming:
“Abey oye! Jeers!”