Sad but true

You have to die to see the light?
Is the weight of the world on you?
Constantly seeking to change the world
But never to change yourself
You are a pain here but expecting pleasure hereafter?
You may be blessed but are you a blessing?

Thus begins "Sad but true", a song from "The Aryan Crusade" - Rudra's second commercial album. Rudra is a death metal band. Vedic death metal, one could classify. They pick hymns from hindu scriptures and makes songs out of them.
Rudra is a cosmic god. The lord of terror, the lord of compassion, Shivam and Shantam. According to myth, this god, Rudra, has no time to spend with the dead. He deals only with the living, the striving, the aspiring.
This is myth. This is philosophy. That which the westerner borrowed.
Ayn Rand called this living, striving, aspiring the prime mover. That small, small percentage of the population who keeps the world moving. The creators, His master copies. The dead are the parasites. The living deads. Sponges.

The desperate need for a savior
Is for the fool and the weak

The song plays on.

Insecurity. Characteristic #1 of a parasite. Insecurity at work, in a relationship, etc.
Parasites could be a pain in the ass for the next parasite.
Competition. That which keeps the dead alive.
Prime movers don't dwell in competition. Not external atleast. HE designed them for struggles so that the rest could get by. And characteristically enough, they, the sponges, look down upon the people who struggle ! Hypocrisy, lies, fear. Pick the next person and you could find all these traits and a few more.
Parasites kill. They kill that which they never created ( They never create anything, without exception. ). Not even contributed anything to. But they kill. That's their right, their nature. Characteristic #3.

Victims of ruthless negation
Your ashes shall adorn our foreheads
as a sign of Victory!
You have the right to believe but I
have the power to dismiss!
Satyameva Jayate!

Another song ends.

Names

Everything was okay till he mentioned his name.

As they lay on a tired bed on an early morning of frenzied passion - her face on his chest looking window-wards, he almost lost in the mists of sleep - she spoke as if in a dream, or so it seemed to him, "Samar, where do we go from here?"
"Anand. Anand it is."

They say madness is a manifestation of the unconscious. Freud called the unconscious a monster, an evil within us. It didn't matter if Anand agreed or not. It also didn't matter if Jung had corrected the theory or not. Anand had let off to slip something so trivial yet so devilish that his conscious had ever feared to confront.

"I don't know why marriage is so important for sex. Vice versa and that's fact. Marriage is man's one stop solution for his need of companionship. It should be above sex. Sex, outside of marriage, is a state of mind. A shallow one. I think if you are being cared for, are understood and you know . . . I don't think one should dissolve a marriage solely on sexual grounds. But then, you can't just ignore your libido forever too. "
"Hmm."

Boy, was he charming and confusing, in a charming kind of way.
It isn't difficult to get a lady, a married lady, to bed. You should be enticing and young, younger than her and talk and talk and talk. These, coincidentally are also a few things which get lost in the process of growing up in a marriage. Did I mention name?

Names don't really matter. Unless you are lying about it. And if you are, oh, don't let your unconscious play with your tongue. Anand was Samar to her till then. He was a bastard after that. For him, she was good.

P.S: This is fiction. THIS IS FICTION.

Pipe dreams !

He slept with a Ray and a Proferes and a 5200 under his chest and dreams of his younger self drinking the 8 1/2 potion from a witch and coming out of a castle, a great director.

..things are interesting when they are amazing ..things are useful when they are amazing ..things are really nice when they are amazing..

is the description of a blog called Amazing Stuffs. Sigh.

Vacation

Girl: You bloody whore.

Boy: Yeah...a bloody expensive one.

Girl: Hah!

Boy: You are boring. I thought you would ask my price.

Girl: I know your price. 23 thousand, nai?

Boy: And what’s the calculation there? 1 thousand per year?

Girl: Neah. That’s what you earn.

Boy: Shesh! Anything. You know what? Let’s fix a price now. Suppose its 1 thousand per year.

Girl: Ookay? Now, that’s too low a price for you my prince.

Boy: Well, its 1 thousand per year till 18. But after that it’s a young boy’s innocence that I’m taking care of. Very wanton, very unscrupulous. So 5 thousand per year after that. 18 thousand and 30 thousand makes it 48 thousand. That’s my price.

Girl: Nice. Is this what you do at The Firm? Think up loony logic for pricing otherwise cheap objects? What are you so thinking about, eh?

Boy: Your rate, ofcourse.

Girl: Yeah, right. Scamp!

Boy: Supposing the 1 grand price for you too till the cherry starts assuming real value. When does that happen to you guys? 16? 10? 13? Not 18. That’s old.

Girl: Scamp!

Boy: What would you sell for? Don’t give jazz like my cherry. Priceless.

Girl: Why don’t you tell me, then?

Boy: Never really thought about it. And even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell. I want to hear it from you.

Girl: Ah, bull. Though it’s not priceless. A diamond necklace? A ring maybe. Diamond.

Boy: Wow! That’s nowhere near priceless. Although I’ll have to sell myself twice over for even that ring. Implies I could never have your misuage, that holy cherry.

Girl: No, but if it’s you I could go a little cheap. A solitaire ring should do.

Boy: I’ll still have to sell myself, you see.

Girl: Dirt.

Kids! *Sigh*

No book, no writer, no one has ever made me so acutely conscious of my language as a recent Orkut testimonial. Such intensity. No, not intensity. Orgasmicity. Such orgasmicity of emotions, such torrent of profound words, such impossible orthography, such mad lovemaking with the language, you sit, shift, cringe, grin with a drop of tear and read the ejaculation once again, again and again. Kind of orgasm ( expression is really not the word here. Please bear with me ! ) only capable for people who have recently discovered it. Eighteeners, I say!
Here is what I am talking about. Oh, and if you get any real insight about what the writer is testimonying about, please! Hint: I found this on my friend's profile.

I feel honoured to write a few words for my prodigious frd..
My fingerzz r assigned 2 keyboard at present bt m in articulate of words...
Its not so easy to write about him....coz hes an immensily talented guy...... but after meeting him wht experience i had.....i will jolt down here...he is such a consortment of ingenous entity dat it wud eventually b unattainable to delineate abt his disposition..dis amiable frnd of mine wid a benignant serenity on his comely face is xtrmly bounteous n complaisant at heart....u juss talk to him once n u gonna dive in an ocean of such a mellifluous n soothin colloquy 4m him u dont wanna cum out.. Friend is a guy with a unbeatable brain and a heart full of enthusiasm..when it comes to sweetness i bet no one can beat him... I wonder how he manages so many things. he never lets any1 enter his sorrows.... but true frnds find out...... i pray to god tht my frndship wid friend continues till ma last breath....keep smiling...cheers!

Note: I have used some words you would never find in a dictionary. What do you expect!

On the nature of memory and the art of novel.

I am obviously not going to write anything on the topic. Just came along a very interesting observation by Kundera in his collection of essays, Testaments Betrayed. This blog, nostalgia being its prominent motif, would do good to have it in its patio.

When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when it is happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.

We can assiduously keep a diary and note every event. Rereading the entries one day, we will see that they cannot evoke a single concrete image. And still worse: that the imagination is unable to help our memory along and reconstruct what has been forgotten. The present - the concreteness of the present - as a phenomenon to consider, as a structure, is for us an unknown planet; so we can neither hold on to it in our memory nor reconstruct it through imagination. We die without knowing what we have lived.

The need to resist the loss of the fleeting reality of the present arose for the novel, I think, only at a certain moment in its evolution. In Boccaccio the tale exemplifies the abstraction that the past becomes upon being recounted: without concrete scenes, nearly without dialogue, a kind of summary, it is a narration that gives us the essence of an event, the casual sequence of a story.

Oh, the name!

In that last tag I mentioned a book, Sculpting in Time which I wished I had. News: I still don't have it. Crosswords has a genie-like sounding service called dial-a-book and I had their number saved for quite a while without really having to make use of it. Make use of it I did, yesterday, for Sculpting and heres how the conversation between me and a Crosswords executive went :

Me: Hi, I was wondering if you have this book called Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky.

Executive: Sir, who is the Author?

( I would have been a little surprised if Sculpting in Time was the Author of Andrei Tarkovsky )

Me: Andrei Tarkovsky?

Executive: Oh!, Sir, Can you spell that last name for me? Its D . . . ?

Me: No, no. It's T. Uhh, T as in Tea?

Executive: As in Delhi?

Me: No, no. As in Thane...Uhh...Train.

Executive: Ok?

Me: Oh, alright. T as in train, A as in apple, R as in romeo, K as in key, O as in org . . . uhh, oscar?, V as in victor, S as in sugar, K as in key and Y as in you.

Executive: Sir?

Me: I meant Y-O-U. Ahh, Y as in yankee?

Executive: Sir, and the first name?

Me: Andrei? Its like the word "and" and then R as in romeo, E as in elephant and I as in India.

Executive: Please hold sir ( and poof! )

Those 3-4 agonizing minutes I waited like a pregnant lady - girl for yes, boy for no.

Executive: Sir, we used to have this book some time back but don't have a copy anymore. If you waant I can order one but it's going to be extremely difficult. The last book was bought in 1992 at Chennai.

With a haila! feeling I asked him to still order it and see if he got some other books on my list.

Executive: ( with a bored, Wt F-doesn't-he-have-any-work, raised left eyebrows, lowered right corner of the lips tone ) Okay.

Me: Great, the first one is Reason to Live by Amy Hempel.

Executive: Last name of the Author, Sir?

Me: Hempel. H-E-M-P-E-L.

Executive: Okay, H-E-M-B-E-L?

Me: No! P. As in Pain? Pakistan!

Executive: And what's the name of the book?

With raised expectations and a smile I told the name.

Executive: We do not have that book by Hempel.

Me: Oh, so which one do you have?

Executive: Actually we do not have any book by Hempel.

Me: I see. And, how about Clown Girl by Monica Drake?

Executive: ( On his deathbed of boredom or exhaustion or exasperation or something similar ) Is it D-R-A-K-E?

Me: ( with a pleasant surprise in the midst of ruins ) Yes, yeah!

Executive: No sir. We do not have anything by Drake Monica, either.

Me: Look, thats quite unbelievable. Whats the contact for Landmark?

Executive: Sorry Sir, I don't have that.

A neat zero probability of finding anything at Crosswords. Cute.
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"I love the music" acquires a totally different meaning when stupid maharashtrian punks does the pointing downward 'bizness' like the eminemised, bling-cartoons on TV while listening to bam-bam hip-hop, 12db flat.

Them Tags

And a book tag came along my way. I am so glad I was tagged for this and Ramya , for that I forgive you for misspelling my blogpage in your post.
In Nick Hornby's High Fidelity when Rob is asked to name his top 5 records of all time, he panics. His life revolved around music but when he was asked the question he was caught short, unprepared. That's the problem with things that you really like. Books, music, movies, the good things. All the books you ever read is what you are, your friends and you would hate to number them, prioritize them, let anyone down.
But the good thing about these book tags is that you get to talk about them and classify them into neat sections like the books in a library. Only if libraries had sections like, 'Books that change your life', 'Books that you would read more than once', 'Books that you would want to take to a desert' et al.

I shall start.

1) Books that changed your life :

Great Expectations, Dickens - Read it, re-read it, loved it as a teenager. Quite a book for the impressionable mind. Also, gave me a certain idea of beauty which I have still not felt a need to get over.

The Fountainhead, Rand - Incendiary. Pray tell me who has not been blown away with the ideologies that Rand had to preach. And especially when you are young and the mind is like a nymphet - randy for all things exciting.

2) A book that I have read more than once :

The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger - I think I have read it atleast 4 times. Nice, thin, comforting, extremely readable paperback.

High Fidelity, Nick Hornby - Theres a pattern here, isn't it ?

3) A book that you would take to a desert :

Anything by Wodehouse, or Hornby .
Did I forget Satanic Verses? Satanic Verses, Rushdie it would be!

4) Books that made you laugh

Lolita, Nabokov - That man of wantonly gorgeous prose and achingly beautiful narrative. People, humor is Nabokov. And so is tragedy and love and life. Ok, I am not forgetting Dostoevsky or Gorky and other Russian writers here. Just that the Nabokovian style is too seductive, too beautiful.

5) Books that made you cry

Requiem for a dream, Herbert Shelby Jr. - The movie, then the book. The movie made me sick in the guts. The book? Oh! If theres another book about drugs and shattered dreams, I would love to read it. I don't mind crying.

Love in the time of cholera, Marquez - For Florentino Ariza. How I wished he got Fermina Daza throughout and how I cried when, at last, they went on that voyage in the boat. How I related to all that!

6) A book you wish had been written

If I know of a plot that is never thought of , I'd rather write it than discuss it here!
I will change the rule a little and make it 'A book that you wish you had now'.

It is Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky. I am sure it would be a delight to read the great filmmaker talk about cinema and music and life and all art.

7) Books you wish had never been written

No idea !

8) Books you are currently reading :

The Metamorphosis, Kafka.
Short Stories of Dostoevsky.
Mystic Masseur, Naipaul.

And then how could a book tag ever be complete without a "Books that you started but never finished"?

Mine are :

The story of a life by Konstantin Paustovsky - The size of the book weighs so much on my mind that even with its exquisitely beautiful narrative, I haven't been able to go beyond 80 - 100 pages. I will read it one day. I will !

Moby Dick, Herman Melville - Although I had heard a lot about the book and even found it deep and even funny at times, the language got too hard, too archaic for me to enjoy it without constantly referring to a dictionary. So I rest Moby Dick for the moment and the tag.

9 Seconds.

A click, a shot,

Bang, Pang!

Smoke.

Recoil, shear,

Sigh. Period.

Math !

How to have fun while travelling in a jam packed local train.

1) Stand at the door. Let the breeze hit your face.

2) Hum your favorite song.

3) Take the most fundamental mathematical formulae ( MF2 ), dress them up into some hypothetical situation and see if it stands.

So (+) * (+) = (+) , (+) * ( - ) = ( - ) and ( - ) * ( - ) = ( + ), eh? Fundamental indeed. For dressing them up into a neat hypothetical something, I introduce a buyer, (B) and a seller (S). BullShit? *Grin* I know. *Grin* . Anyways, a ( + ) for a buyer or a seller would be a profit in terms of money, good product or the outcome of the business, nai? And the ( - ) for both B & S would be a loss in terms of all those above mentioned. Suppose B & S does this business one day and someone ( L ) with no life at all but armed with all those mighty formulae ( conventions ? ) sits between them, picking teeth, and applying them to their dealings. B is a nice, old, honest B and sells goods exactly worth the money he gets. So far so good, the picking continues and the formulae rests. Then B gives S x amount of money to buy y kg of some good and the picking stops. Since B gave S x Rs, it could either be a ( - ) for B or a ( + ) for S considering that the good has not been exchanged yet. But the moment the good is exchanged, it is a ( + ) for B in terms of a good product ( and ofcourse ( - ) in terms of the money and hence considering only either one of the possibilities ) and a corresponding ( + ) for S in terms of the money he gained for the exchange. Thats the LHS. ( + ) and ( + ). The RHS or the outcome of the dealing would be a satisfied B for the good ( + ? ) and a satisfied S for the business he got ( + ? ) and hence a ( + ) eitherways on the RHS.
Very simple, straightwforward and non-revolting. So damn far and still so good.
So now, L , the guy with no life at all decides to try something which he then didn't realize would drive revolt up his ass. He very simply goes to S and buys a product which comes with a free something, F. S, honest and ambitious as he is, sells F alongwith the product with a logical expectation that the outcome of the dealing would be a ( + ) even if that amounts to a ( - ) in the actual dealing which is in the LHS. For L, the LHS is an obvious ( + ) and so is the outcome or the RHS. This means that when the LHS is a certain ( + ) * ( - ), the RHS can be ( - ) but according to business logic, it has a high possibility of being ( + ) too. Which then disproves MF2 atleast in one microcase and blows off L because he had read somewhere ( Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance ? ) that even if a formula stands in a million cases but fails in just one, it is a failed formula.
Ok, so I am L and I'm of course wrong. What I'd love is an argument good enough to disprove the disproved and re-prove the original convention.

Talking about conventions, conventions of orthography says that a curved anything would appear as a straight line in the front view. Does that apply for a person with a squint?

Cricket !

THERE IS a certain element of nostalgia associated with watching an old cricket match. The scorecard with the names of men who seem like old friends who disappeared into an oblivion without a farewell, the voice of commentators who taught you the basics of the game which you so loved, even a certain indescribable quality of the crowd which all defined a cricket match of your childhood. Its like watching an old favorite movie. You know the story and the dialogue. You even remember the parts where you got the bumps when you watched it the first time - 7, 8, 10 years back and still watch it with an air of suspense and awe.

You look at people whose future you already know - a captain who would be a nobody in a few years, a prodigy who remained untouched after eversomany matches, the commentators who became coaches and the coaches who went on awfully big adventures. Its fascinating, emotional even. Because when you watch these matches, along with all your good old friends; the people whom you 'grew up with', you also see the kid you were some years back. You are his future and you are not sure if you are what he dreamt of when he daydreamed during those matches. You feel an urge to walk back a few years and hug that little kid and apologize to him for not looking after his dreams as you were supposed to and you hope he forgives you and even says a few good things about you and at the back of your mind you know he will. He was not so bad.

The only defense against your own people is sleep. A long, long, long sleep. Had said this sometime back. But what if those same people shake you up, ask you what's up, sigh and pat you back to sleep?

A Chat

If you ever used Yahoo's chat service or any other chat service for that matter, you couldn't miss them . If a survey was conducted they would unanimously be declared the people most hooked to chat technology. The Philippines. One, ermm two, no three characteristics make a Philippine stand out. Unbearable dumbness, extreme lack of vocabulary and unicorn-like horniness. Of course its only the chat populace that I'm referring to.
One of these days I was in a Yahoo chat room and IMing every female screenname I saw. I had a format ready - "Hey, hru, asl?" - in the clipboard and was pasting that into all the windows. It seemed I missed one id though but it didn't miss me. A window with a "Hi" popped up and within a few seconds a friendly "hru". The "asl" ceremony also went fine, notwithstanding the fact that I had started a conversation with a 21/F/Phlpns. After a few introductory remarks, she popped a simple question which was to become the subject of a post in a few days.

Phlpn : So, where are you?

( I was home. I have a PC and was on a chair. It all seemed so obvious that I thought it unnecessary to even answer that question. At least not directly. So I thought I'd have a little fun and said )

Me: In the loo, taking a shit.

Phlpn: Huh?, What do u mean?

Me: Loo. Shit.

Phlpn: What?

Simple deduction. 21/F/Phlpns did not either know what a loo was or what you were supposed to do in it under normal, non-excitable circumstances.

Me: Baby, Loo = Toilet.

Superquick, mega smart, ultrahot Phlpn: Oh, so you are 'masterbating' ?

Me: Uhh, yeah.

Curious Phlpn: And your media?

Me: My what?

Dr. Phlpn : Your media. With what you masterbate? Your weapon.

Me: Oh that. Yeah. My sword you mean?

Eager Phlpn: Yes, yes *deep grin*. What it doing?

Me: Oscillating. Up, up, down, down, Mm, Mm.

Excited Phlpn: You moan?

Me: No, I groan. And cry.

Confused Phlpn: Uh, why cry?

Me: Fun.

She didn't reply.

All I am capable of while listening to a fanatic is sit frozen and wonder about the miniaturization people can bring about in a human being in the name of 'enlightenment'. Its only more chilling when the loudest arguments come from parts where men thought the most for the nation. I think of religious fanaticism and arguments or fights based on them as arguments between two men who can read and write, yes, but don't have a mind or knowledge to think. So if you give two magazines, say India Today to one and Outlook to the other and asked them to discuss the same topic for a certain prize money, ( something about which they are hitherto blank and written using different examples, references ) it would be amusing, dismaying for some, to watch the men disagreeing and arguing over issues which never existed, quoting exclusively from the few pages of text that have been fed to them, all for the prize and without reason. What difference could you possibly find between these men and those fighting over the Koran and the Gita and the Bible?

You walk the ever barren fields in a mad state of this crazy country and the shrieks - helpless, deserted - of girls, daughters of the same fate and mother enter your ear and gets trapped in that area between your eyes, where I believe the conscience is, and never escapes. Raped, breasts lightened off from the body and then, as the final honour for being women, sent to another world. Walk a little further and you see a child crawling, struggling to stand up and walk to go find his father and mother and brother and everyone he had ever seen or touched and if the people of his beloved motherland continued to get enlightened the same way, he would not have to travel too far. Such piety, such devotion for the unseen, the Harry Potterlike characters of the myth, you stand and freeze.

As you dream of of the lines of a book never written or that unique business gambit never thought of or that last bead in the string which unified all scientific theories ever known to man, the sanctity gets destroyed when you think that dreamt under the same sky with the same unsurety of the closed eyes are dreams of erasing civilizations, religions, people, ideas. A certain group of our enlightened ones do not think favorably about a religion whom they call a minority. They want the traces of this minority ( the number which funnily enough far exceeds the population of the United Kindgdom and France put together ) to be scored out of the nation. Then proceeding to a larger scale, they want a nation to be scored out from the face of the world.

It would be helpful now to bring those two men who could read and write but with hobbling minds in. They were blank about their issues and hence the argument which ensued guaranteed that nothing could come out other than the few lines of print they could read and enlighten themselves with. And if the prize money depended on a definite conclusion, they could go on and exchange a few blows if they felt the argument was going nofuckingwhere. And then supposing there were two such men in each team and one team eventually blew the other out and after all that a meagre prize was awarded? A civil situation indeed! Iran could be an example of this team and situation.

Today, the whole concept of religion and everything coming out of it, is based on a feeling of superiority. "My religion and its teachings - holy". And the feeling of superiority, of being the elder brother, the magisterial outlook, I believe, often leads to supression, disregard and violence. If instead the prime mover was a feeling of inferiority? Levels of inferiority driven by ones literacy and intellect. I am a firm believer that a self respecting human being is not motivated in an academic environment for his own good as much by a feeling of insecurity and inferiority as by anything else. And this motivation could really not lead to violence or unreasonableness and irrationality because they in turn could only lead to your downslide in such an environment. This, on an evolutionary basis would lead to a nation whose religions would be reason and intellect and knowledge rather the ones based on shaky, unseen scruples and hence to a perfectly developed democracy and nation.

Its funny how people adapt themselves to the stuff they read. So when you read a sentence that makes no sense, you adapt yourself to the "writer's point of view" even though the writer would have failed miserably in conveying what he wanted to, at the first place. Its funny. The more you don't understand, the higher the writer stands in your top 5, top 10 lists. Jim Morrison, for example, in An American Prayer sings poetry - most of which floats 6 feet over my head. I prefer to call such stuff psychedelic and I think they are fun to listen to. So when he sings, " Out here we is stoned, Immaculate " , I gape at the shenanigan of the guy and his beautiful meaninglessness to me - so much so that I get a poster of him and worship him. Its an art to make unreasonableness and meaninglessness sound meaty. The art for me is poetry. Psychedelic poetry, rather. An act only Gods are capable of. Right now my Gods are Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison. Their songs are my mantras. Its a good thing they are dead. We have never seen Gods, right?