MILLION DOLLAR SMILE

A stranger smiled at me in the bus this morning. In India, if a stranger smiles at you he will either be an LIC agent or a multi-level marketing guy. Mine happened to be the latter and to make matters worse he had a bad breath. He moved closer by pushing me to the window and slowly and unsuspectingly weaved a web around me and harped to his heart’s content about the MLM philosophy and how I can mint millions without moving my ass. One of the arts I have perfected over time is to look absolutely delighted when I am utterly bored and that makes me a star amongst the sales and marketing brethren.

I nodded happily as he chewed my ear with the quality and range of the products that I could in turn harp about in buses and trains to unsuspecting strangers. His bad breath was making it tougher and tougher for me to continue my grinning and maybe he mistook that as undecidedness and he promptly opened a bag which was as unsuspecting as him. He pulled out a torn magazine and having been subjected to forced classes on MLM before I instantly recognized Sagayamary and Paulraj who my torturer claimed paid an IT of 35 lakhs last year and left it to my imagination on what kind of money they minted.

He then went on to pick samples of the products that we could sell and to my utter delight one of them was a mint mouth spray. I was seriously hoping that he would spray some of it in his mouth and blow on my face like a toothpaste model but to my disappointment he chose to spray it on my palm and made me smell it. Fuck you stranger. For the first time that morning I felt happy for the simple reason that I was not traveling with him the whole day to a godforsaken place. He sensed that his prey would be off his claws any moment now and scribbled his mobile number on a piece of paper and offered it to me. I promised to call him one of these Sundays when I felt like smelling some bad breath from close quarters and jumped off the bus even before it stopped. Paulraj, you should seriously consider telling your clan to use more of that goddamn mint spray man.