From Kejriwal to Sanjay Dutt: The numbers that will define 2014

By Tanmay Bhat

Instead of doing a column about the year that went by, on the last day of the year, I thought it’d be fun to try and predict what’s going to happen in the coming year. And because this is India, I wouldn’t put it past us to manage to realise some of these numbers. So here goes:

632893: The number of times Arvind Kejriwal will use the word “Aam Aadmi” in a single interview, setting a new world record in the field of Extreme Predictability. The media will hail this as a political masterstroke, young people will get the word tattooed on previously un-needled body parts and brand managers will unanimously achieve sexual climax by managing to shove these words into PPT pitches to their clients.

4: The number of meteors that will land on Indian surface. India TV will run the headline, “KYA YEH SACH MUCH METEOR HAI YA BHAGWAAN KA BOOGER?!”. India will claim there was a Pakistani hand in the meteor shower and an 1800-page dossier will be sent to Pakistan in retaliation. (This dossier will later be found in a sewage plant in northern Karachi.)

600 crore rupees: The new all time Bollywood box office record that will be set in 2014. Rohit Shetty will direct this film starring Salman Khan, Mahindra Scorpios and an item song by Gravity. Alok Nath will grant special permissions to the producers of this film to let Diwali coincide with Eid. Eight students studying world cinema at FTII will mysteriously commit suicide once these figures are released.

393: The number of books that will be authored by IITians. Of them, 390 will be coming-of-age teenage angst romantic comedy. Three hundred and sixty will have puns in their title. Bollywood will adapt 28 of them. Six will star Arjun Kapoor. Four more FTII students will be found dead once these films are announced.

4838: The runs scored by Virat Kohli and the new record for highest run aggregate in a calendar year. Oxford English Dictionary will officially add the word behe*** to the English language.

11: The number of Indian mothers who will suffer heart attacks after catching their sons watching the latest Miley Cyrus video. The video will feature a topless Miley Cyrus, seductively eating a lollipop, twerking against a painting of the pope, while wearing a g-string made out of the American flag, at a cemetery. Crying. The song will be at number one on the charts for 88 straight weeks.

839: The number of new Bollywood songs that Yo Yo Honey Singh will sing, 470 of which are sexist, 203 are racist, 128 are communist and 12 of them are declared as official acts of terror by the UN security council. At around the same time, FTII will shut down because it’s unable to handle the suicide epidemic on its campus.

43: The number of minutes Sanjay Dutt will spend in jail in the whole calendar year. The court will accept Dutt’s request to take leave from jail (citing the reason “because mood nahi hai mamu”), leading to mass outrage on Twitter. Dutt’s latest movie titled Prisoner-giri will hold its premiere at Yerawada Jail. Dawood Ibrahim will attend the premiere at the jail. Mumbai Police will announce in a press conference that they are unaware of Ibrahim’s whereabouts.

8667: The number of rupees to a dollar as the Indian currency hits an all time low. India will officially rename its currency to “LOL”. The official symbol for the LOL will be :’(.

150: The price of a kilo of onions. Potatoes will cost Rs 300 rupees per kilo. The prime minister will cite “Aloo-Do-Pyaaza” as reason for the crumbling economy. Arnab Goswami will debates the price rise on The News Hour. Eight dubstep tracks of the debate go live three minutes after the show.

1,00,000: The price of the new iPhone 6 in India. Apple will drop the “call making” and “call receiving” features, and it will become the highest-selling phone of all time. Micromax will hire Morgan Freeman as their brand ambassador. Nokia will still suck.

11 billion: The number of hits a video of a baby panda wearing a tutu, hugging an African American child dressed as Elvis, will get. Further in the future, the child will grow up, eventually become an alcoholic and go into rehab.

93: The number of athletes who will follow in the footsteps of Lance Armstrong and confess to consuming performance-enhancing drugs. IOC President Thomas Bach will releases their official statement, which will read “Duuuuuuuuuuudeeee!!!!!!!”. All of Lance Armstrong’s titles will be reinstated. Usain Bolt will set a new record by running the 100 metres in 3 seconds, backwards, wearing heels, while doing the Macarena.

84: The number of cars that will be rammbed into Amul hoardings, as a form of protest against the ridiculously low standards of puns in Amul ads. Amul will respond by releasing a hoarding that says, “Do you want our puns to get butter?”, thus rendering the entire exercise futile.

Happy 2014. Tanmay Bhat is a writer, comedian, podcaster and co founder of All India Bakchod. You can find him on Twitter as @thetanmay or on Facebook.