9 to 1

If the countless samurai movies that I have seen are to be believed, Japanese folks are an aggressive lot. Imagine a culture where the most disciplined & self controlled of the lot - the monks, train to be supreme martial art & lethal weapons exponents, during their free time. In India, the most extreme physical activity that any monk has undertaken so far during his free time (according to Sh Ramanand Sagar) has been watching item numbers by 'apsaras' hell bent on breaking his concentration.

So it was not surprising that the Japanese unleashed the most potent & devilish weapon ever invented by man, after Gobi Manchurian Dry. Men, women & kids across remote corners of the world are going crazy over a series of squares - labelled easy, hard & godzilla, a pack of pencils a day & antidepressants. It has been described by many as the disease which would fill up the map of the world shown in many disaster movies, fastest, in red colour. There is no defence against it other than complete illiteracy.

In a classic attempt at disinformation & covering their tracks, the Japanese have gone so far as to say that the weapon was actually invented by an 18th century Swiss post master. Many retired post masters have since then denied this allegation saying that if they could actually use nine numbers simultaneously, then why have we been having only six digit post box numbers? But the most vehement opponent to this so called past-time has been none other than George Bush, saying "It is hard enough to write from 1 to 9 in the correct sequence, making people fill them into tiny little squares along the axes of evil, can only be the handiwork of al Qaeda".

A sudden spike in the number of students taking up complex & imaginary number courses and the reduction of the Amazon rain forest by 30% to meet the demand for pencils have been attributed to the epidemic reach of this weapon. In a rather premature attempt to be the 'thinking supermodel's hero', Salman declared "I think, therefore I Sudoku". Subsequent research has shown that 'Sudoku' actually means 'I am making a fool of myself' in a Japanese dialect spoken only by shaolin monks trained in martial arts & lethal weapons.