i ching

Our Ouija Board game.

2009-02-17T08:36:00.000-08:00

Just when the massive amount of economics literature I've been devouring lately was beginning to bear off my sense of youth, my sister asked, "Da, do you still believe in planchette?". My response was a sweeping "No!" but I immediately realized I had nothing to add to that. Just the way an earnest believer would say "Yes" when asked if she believed in god.

Cricket and board games made up almost all my playing life in school. Just like everyone else I knew at that time, me, my sister and our group of friends in the building played Carrom, Snakes & Ladders, Lotto, really, really lame Chess and when the power went off - which, incidentally, made us all so happy we screamed ( we also screamed when it came back ) - we would retreat into a dark corner of someone's house ( randomly chosen, ofcourse ), light a candle very businesslike and pull out a notebook which we knew contained the Ouija board. Pin drop silence followed the planchette prayer and for some of us the excitement rose so high we had to scurry to the bathroom to relieve a bit of the extra-excitement and scamper back, just so we didn't miss the spirit. We were advised to invoke spirits of people we knew and to ask easy questions lest we upset their egos. My favorite spirits to invoke were Mahatma Gandhi and my grandfather. And I had two favorite questions : "When did India become free?" to Mahatma Gandhi and "What is my name?" to grandpa. Self-assurance, it seemed, was all I needed back then. Much to everyone's amusement, the planchette moved to 1, 9, 4, 7 and S, U, J, I when I was the medium and then gasping and satisfied, we would say the closing planchette prayers and request the spirit to leave the board and room.

So when my sister asked if I still believed in planchette ( which is what we called the Ouija board game ) a torrent of memories came rushing. What stumped me was I knew the planchette moved not as a "motor-reflex action to one's sub-conscious thoughts" as one of the popular explanations go, but in a very real, physical and intelligible sense. There seems no plausible answer and so I content myself by reckoning that in the "reasonable" world where even unreasonableness has reasons ( as new theories on behavioral economics explain ), a smack of such an enigma is very grounding indeed. And that, I believe, is definitely a fair reason to be content about.

The Extraction

2009-02-02T09:26:00.000-08:00

This may be a little gross but it needs to get out of my head.

He anesthetized and cooed sweet things into me as if preparing a lamb for slaughter. In a few minutes, the decided area of war - gums, left wisdom tooth, upper palette - seemed numb and ready for carnage. That I have faced those drills and hammers and pincers and jacks and needle and knife before made me feel braver and readier than I was. And then I had my gameplan too. I would tell my dentist - my butcher - to relax, play according to the rules, not get charged up as the battle intensified ( because I knew this was going to be a tense, long battle ). And he obliged, smiled, laughed softly at my stress and poured in that maddening light into my face and said aaaaa and I did aaaa and ...

I had decided I'd close my eyes till the enemy played its little game and won. This proved disastrous because with the eyes closed the brain started playing a game of cat and mouse with whatever metal touched my mouth. The jack - because that's all I could think that instrument as, that which helps pull out wheels of a Landrover stuck deep in quicksand - went in first. It touched the gums, did a few tick-tocks with the tooth ( one old Banyan it turned out to be ), and ,umm, started pushing for space between the gum and tooth, trying to, as it turned out, find the roots of the tree. The roots were firmly, firmly rooted and soon my Ripper found out just pushing and playing with the jack wasn't going to be enough. The pincers grasped the tooth next. And as if it really was a tree, started to shake it, with the jack between the gum and tooth, pushing it down. The bloodbath, as I had anticipated, had begun. The noises around the room drowned into a vacuum and my head formed its own noises - shrill, unbearable noises - of images. I shut my eyes tight as a chicken shrieked, someone twisted its neck and then separated it from its body - its body writhing, a gloved hand tore my face at the jaws, a crowd beat up a young man, blood all over him and Holocaust and a hundred grotesque devils raped a young girl and and ... You think I am exaggerating.

The pincers pushed and pulled at the tooth, the jack pushed it down and tears made a steady stream from the side of my eyes and blood, made thicker with saliva, oozed slowly from the side of the mouth as cotton ball erased its path now and then leaving just the dry outline of the stream. A piece of teeth withered between the jaws of the pincers, so they gripped even closer to the gums. Pull-push-push-pull ( oh I could tell how it would be to be in labor ). And click! Blood! Blood! Blood!

And we were done. The battle was over, the battlefield a bloody mess.

As it turns out, your senses go into overdrive in times of pain. It becomes sensitive to sound the way a person with an extreme case of leukemia is to sunlight. The most effective way to ease pain is to first quieten the noises in the head. And for that there could possibly be no better tool than music. But suppose you plugged in the headphones and your player played one of those louder songs with a lot of lyrics and which you love to listen to when you are 'normal' ? Bleeding again! That does not mean to say any classical, soft, slow, music would kiss the pain away. No. The trick is to avoid anything vocal. Human beings are no good when it comes to easing of pains. Violins, sitars and pianos - Ravi Shankar, L Subramanian or Bach. And no Beethoven. Just...Just avoid Beethoven.

How I ended up being disliked in the neighbourhood or How I stirred up a hornet's nest one fine Sunday.

2008-11-16T10:10:00.000-08:00

On hindsight, I should have thought a little more before calling for a drastic change in the way we shared on the Local Area Network ( LAN ). I should have remembered Ariely's notes about shifting social norms to market norms and all its ill effects. Or maybe, for starters, I should simply have put a more popular movie for sale on LAN. Yeah, sale ! Whoever heard of that, right? Or was the price a little too steep for an introductory price? One thing I am sure about is when I put the following message to the guys on LAN, the responses were not favorable.

The message read thus :

Hello people! ( Before I go ahead, let me tell you that I am NO fan of free sharing. If anything's worth your time, it's worth your money too.)

From today I introduce "The Honour System" ( yeah, Freakonomics and more recently Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational ) according to which I decide a price range for each movie I have. If you want that movie, I'll give you it's minimum and maximum price ( depending upon the quality of audio / video, movie and demand ) and you decide how much you pay ( ofcourse staying within that range. )

I decided to introduce this because I spend time and money researching about every movie and I find absolutely no reason why you should get it for free and then not appreciate it.

So there, you heard it. Free sharing is evil unless absolutely necessary and so I'm charging for the movies I share. Who wants movies from me now?

My first paid movie : The Profit. ( 2001 )

Director : Peter N. Alexander

Genre : Drama.

Tagline: A dark journey into an evil mind where the only good is...The Profit.

IMDb rating : 7.2

Min price: Rs. 75 /-

Max. price: Rs. 100 /-.

And the responses ( in the typical no-holds-barred LAN lingo ) read thus :

( My responses in italics ).

>> bonzi >> SUJITH (JABBERWOCKY ) IS HOMOSEXUAL.

HE HAS SEX WITH DOGS SADIST ARSEHOLE.

>> tarun >>If everyone goes on charging for movie why the fuck do we need LAN? We can rent it or buy it from outside.

Ok, so how about if I charged 1 Re? Does that drive my point home? My point is value the fucking movies you get. If you pay for something, you just value it more.

>> monty >>Am not talkin about money here...I just mean that you TRADE here!! You ask for something you want and then when you get it you share something of your's which isn't much important! Like movies..I know you got good collection but you don't share..you just send anything thinking we all are choos and anything you send will make us happy...but sorry am not one of them.....

Well atleast you are getting close to the point. Yea, we are trading here. But if you look at it, most people here ( except you and bonzi ) have shit for movies. Do you call that fair trade?

Now, what's so horrible in charging a small amount for the movies? For me, the mere mention of money would :

1) Introduce an element of productivity into the time you spend downloading movies from the internet.

2) Slowly, but surely, better the quality of movies watched and talked about on LAN and consequently outside of LAN too.

So, then. Were the responses a result of a sudden and unexpected shift of social norm ( free sharing ) to a market norm ( price for each movie ) ? Or were they because the first movie I put up on sale was just not very popular or was it the price? Would the responses have been more favorable if I had, say, kept a lower limit of Re. 1 and a higher limit of Rs. 5 or if the movie was, say, recently released Dostana?

What do you think?

Anti-Hypothesis!

2008-10-06T10:43:00.000-07:00

If you find Arvind's hypothesis on the probability of the current financial crisis becoming a precursor for another baby boom counter-intuitive, come back. We shall talk.

The premise of his argument is that a baby boom has historically followed a state of national distress - true but the line of reasoning goes completely haywire after that. He goes on to comment about how they ( Americans ) have always managed to overcome the realities through their enhanced productivity giving such examples as the WW-2, the war on Vietnam and the 9/11 strikes. But on looking up data ( here, here and here ), that story doesn't seem to hold ground. For instance, the real baby boom in the United States happened after World War -2 precisely between 1946 and 1964 when birth rates went up dramatically ( nearly 16 % - 2.85 million births in '45 to 3.41 million births in '46) and not during World War-2 where, to requote him, people managed to overcome the realities through their enhanced productivity and abilities to handle stress. Moreover, this baby boom happened not only in the United States but in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Sweden, Germany and heck, even in India after '47. Has the world seen that kind of a baby boom after that? Not really. Not after Vietnam ( the war on Vietnam happened in '75 and the birth rate has been going up barely 1% each year after that ) and also not after 9/11 ( the number of births in 2002 actually went down from 2001).

What, then causes a baby boom? Rather than, to quote Arvind again, crises leading to increased sexual activity in a nation ( which I am assuming was intended to be funny than of any real argumentative value ) it is an increased sense of social well being and security, immigration, a realignment of responsibilities among men and women leading to the man leading the conventional role of the bread-winner and woman of the home-maker. All these factors usually happen as a package only after a major war when young males return from their war-time duties, couples reunite, women go back to their usual responsibilities of bearing offsprings and the social and economic restraints that stopped them from starting families disappear and there is a heightened desire among human beings to bond and procreate.

So, now would the current financial crisis be a precursor to a baby boom? Hard as it may have hit the United States' ( and now Europe's ) financial stability, it is noteworthy that it has not caused an economic upheaval like in the Great Recession. It is because the finance community - investment bankers, analysts, financial advisers - form a very small group ( less than 7% of the employed American population if I remember an Economist article correctly ) so that a few ( relatively speaking ) lost jobs and some foreclosures on some bad mortgages do not convert to an economic crisis. Moreover the hardest hit by the financial crisis seems to be people in their 40's where losing a job or a stake in a company could be analogous to death in a battlefield ( very low probability of gaining it all back ), and by the time they ( the country to be precise ) recover from this crisis ( which could be atleast 3 years from now, if not more ) they would be as good as out of the fertile pool.

Point being, without an economic crisis ( rather than a financial crunch ), without a war-like situation, without great instability all leading to a heightened sense of social and economic security ( which an aftermath of this financial crisis do not guarantee ( taxes, remember? ) ) a baby boom seems highly unlikely.

P.S: Writing a reply-post on this wouldn't be worth your time. No, seriously!

What General Motors Gave Me.

2008-09-27T12:57:00.000-07:00

The GM weight loss diet program. Thats what.

I may have lost a kilogram worrying about what I would not be eating during the course of this diet program.

What I intend to give all my readers :

A tailor-made diet program for you, you and you.

Its a simple theory based on the instant gratification principle. The amount of food stocked in your house is indirectly proportional to hunger and directly proportional to the will power to hold back that hunger. Lesser the food in the house, hungrier you feel and less likely that you'll hold back that hunger, consequently ending up in a fast food, instant gratification joint. On the other hand, stock your house with a lot of food and even if you feel hungry, there's a higher probability that you will hold it back because of the comfort of food being available at hand. I am sure by now you must have noticed how this theory can be applied to a myriad of situations starting from sex, money, so on and so forth. So how do you go about implementing this new, extraordinary diet program?

Simple. Stuff your house with a lot of high-energy, low-carb, low-fat food. You'll get hungry less often and even when you do, hey, you have healthy food at hand.

If this worked for you, please feel free to contact me in the comments section for donations and other favors.

Saturday Night Fever

2008-09-27T07:05:00.000-07:00

. . .this modern master piece tells the story of certain events that unfold between 2 and 6 p.m. on a Wednesday in Mumbai; events that do not exist in any record. . .This short, one and a half hour film, has a tight script which would not divert your attention from the silver screen for a split second. . .

Now, here’s a flick that could make your day. . . ( it ) talks about terrorism from a new angle.

. . . one of those rare variety films about which one can't discuss much despite a strong desire for it could hamper your viewing experience as an unapprised audience. It's a film one wants to rave liberally about but even then you can't conveniently converse on the instances of acclaim since those are the moments of surreptitious surprise held in reserve by the director. It's the kind of film that is discussed in detail once it acquires the cult status.

Why, ofcourse, we are talking about the "modern masterpiece" - A Wednesday. If you ask me what exactly makes this movie a "modern masterpiece" I'd stutter for an answer and on my shallowest day come up with something on the lines of what the reviews talk about. But why? Isn't it this short movie with a tight script which would not divert your attention from the movie screen for a split second? Isn't it the flick that could make your day? Or isn't it one of those rare variety films which one can't discuss much despite a strong desire for it could hamper your viewing experience as an unapprised audience? What's wrong with the movie is the grammar in that last line. And the word unapprised. English doesn't have that word in its vocabulary is whats wrong. And what's really, really wrong are all its other reviews. And the people who write them. And those who watch it. And then explode with exuberant confusion at the instant gratification that the movie intends to provide.

For me A Wednesday, for all its worth and with all its reviews, is a good handjob of a movie. The new generation of Bollywood film-makers is, to say the least, tiring in their attempts at making different movies. It is difficult to comprehend the obsession with " delivering a message " with every movie you make. Unless you are a Jean-Luc Godard or a Pasolini of Salo or I.V.Sasi of the early 90s I'd rather read a socio-political article than fantasize to be informed and enlightened about a situation, any situation from a young, opportunistic film-maker picking up a plot and distorting facts to create entertainment value and shoving up a chewed and ruminated over point of view up the audiences' throat in the name of a different movie [1]. And ofcourse such movies are lapped up with both hands by an audience either for lack of choice or lack of information and the latter seems more likely because how could you choose if you don't have the information? And when the responsibility of providing this information rests on a few nincompoops of reviewers and critics and if good audience makes for a good movie-making fraternity, its not difficult to guess where Hindi movies are headed.

Notes :

1) And I truly believed this and this were mediocre attempts at social commentary and to think A Wednesday - that " modern masterpiece " - seems so much like this!

What Me Zero

2008-08-18T12:18:00.000-07:00

Zero appeals to people bred on Steely Dan and Iron Maiden and Led Zeppelin mostly because they played some pretty amazing covers to some of their songs and personally because they are simply not as loud as a Demonic Resurrection ( whom I just don't dig ) or Rudra whom I had mentioned in one of my earlier posts. Zero is more in the class of Parikrama - some wildly good originals and wildly famous.
Was.
Because come Independence Rock this 31st, Zero is going to play one last time as a band.
The last time I talked to Rajeev Talwar ( Zero's lead vocalist for the yet uninitiated ) was to congratulate him for one of their songs. That was when I had discovered them. Ironically ( you'll know why ), the next I talked to him was yesterday and the conversation went like this :
me: Hey dude!

Heard IRock is your last concert? That true?

Rajeev: Hey man

Looks like it .

I am moving to London.

me: Oh , So what about the band???

Rajeev: Well I don't know. And anyway, there is nothing more to do here.

me: How do you mean man?

I love your band. And I know there are a gazillion others.

Rajeev: I know man. But you need to progress as a musician. There are no more good gigs, no more to do than what we have already done. And maybe going to London and trying from there may help.

me: Oh okay. Sounds great. I heard it only yesterday and was a little shocked. Anyways you rocked when you did :)

You are not getting married or something, are you?

Rajeev: *Laughs*

No man!

me: Okay!

Rajeev: Yeah man ... lets see if I can do something in London.

Know some musicians there.

me: Great! Wish you went there just for the music though. You aren't right? I know you are an MBA or something and working somewhere . * Laughs *

Great though ... Mick Jagger and all ... Nice place, eh?

Rajeev: *Laughs* No man ... An agency job.

But I have some musicians lined up and we gonna start a band.

me: Sooper . So Zeros breaking up or something?

Rajeev: I am leaving Zero .... If I come back , I may join them again. :)

me: Ok. All the best to you man.

Rajeev: Thanks man . You too.

Its funny how people who write songs give away so much about themselves in their songs. I am not sure if Rajeev composed PSP 12" but whoever did it is either a superb composer or one heck of a fantast!

P.S: What Me Zero.

How to Lose Friends and Piss off People.

2008-06-28T10:19:00.000-07:00

Tip # 5731.

Boy: Hi! One question. Could be stupid. Was looking at your snaps on Orkut. Do you wear pushups?

Girl: I don't wear pushups, asshole.

Boy: Ok.

We are friends - Past tense.
We were friends - Present tense.

This works entirely on the shock-unexpectancy factor. Choose your weapon depending upon your closeness to him / her.

Extras #1: If you are a guy, hey, how about a "pushup" question to your guy friend?

Tip # 5908.

Stare at your friend's lips while he / she is talking to you.

The beauty of this one is it could work wonders regardless of the gender of the person you are talking to. But then again, nothing like trying it on your best same-sex friend. You get? * wink wink *

Tip # 6014

Chat etiquette.
Go online, be online but never ever talk. Oh and if you are pressed to say something, we have a way around. Say it ( preferably in monosyllables ) exactly after 1 hour and 24 minutes and 43 buzzes, calls etc.
This works depending on your capacity to ignore.

There have been cases of people strangling chat windows.

Tip #6239

Fake. Its a talent and it can be practised to perfection.

Act like a fairy or ( for political correctness ) an angel. Let everyone feel that you are always at arms length. ( in the sky, looking down. * wink * )

P.S. : Curiously no amount of fakeness have known to effect anything in corporate environments. All I can add here is : it is worth studying, this fake-proofness.

Tip # 6498

Time to re-think.

Good relationships start at boundaries and you keep pushing it. Comme la mère et l'enfant. ( what a fucking fake, eh?) So if you are going steady in a friendly sort of relationship ( especially with people of the same gender ), something's wrong. Are you homo?

There are many more. It's only a matter of discovery.
You'll be surprised to find how easy it is to lose all your friends with these very practical tips.

Trips

2008-06-26T02:29:00.000-07:00

As I sat in the bus and
As I listened to The Cranberries in my ipod and
As Dolores sang :
. . . they are dyiiiiiing,
the bus, it's front right tire ran over a man -
brain out, eyes out, tongue out, blood out,
crush, crush, CRUSH.

I fucked, killed,
crushed you in my mind.

Now who is the zombie, motherfucker?

The Island.

2008-06-21T09:51:00.000-07:00

I observed my every move. How I breathed, how my hands moved, where I looked. My mind followed my eyes, my hands, my breath and I let them all be. There was an excruciating amount of ugliness around. Unusual for a Saturday. But that's what my mind, which followed my eyes, saw. The ugliness was not just in the faces. Not just. They were in the expressions in them and the way men laughed and walked and everything else they had to do with being moving and human. So what I did was I let my mind wander into myself. I couldn't be friends with these people. And if I couldn't I had to be friends and get to know someone and so I decided to befriend my breath, my hands and my eyes.

It was not the best Saturday in a long time. I was sick- sick and lonely and I wanted to go out, drink and sulk like a sot. Y was with his mother and brother and he didn't want to go out anyways, K would have come tomorrow but she was at Mira Road so she couldn't, M - well M's was the most uplifting replies. " Who would want to miss being entertained by a drunk 24 year old? But I've got plans for today. Next Friday? " Promising. All said, you don't expect anything less from a married, 29 year old. So then it was V who probably didn't know me and so never replied to the SMS and P whose phone number I've been seeing in my cellphone for a little more than 2 years never bothering to know who it belonged to and he, well he " never went home drunk". The son of a . . .

Could you blame my state of mind?

When you are living alone, you constantly feel the need to be social. Much, much more than when you are living with someone. But all you end up with is talking to your guitar or observing the clock and the ceiling or reading a difficult book ( Deleuze in my case ) which you would probably not have read when people are moving around and if you could observe the clock enough, befriending the air that moved and made the only sound in the house.

I had read about men being large, unfathomed islands. I exactly know what it means.

*************************************************************************************

As the night closes, the day seems to be not all lost. I've been wanting to watch Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia for a long time now and the DVD - my dear, dear, dear friend unearthed itself alongwith Persepolis. The day seems bright at 11.30 in the night.

Sad but true

2007-11-09T05:45:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-05T12:04:00.000-08:00

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 !

2007-10-15T07:18:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-10-14T10:06:00.000-07:00

..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

2007-09-30T08:30:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-20T02:16:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-09-17T12:34:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-09-03T04:29:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-11T12:02:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-07-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

A click, a shot,

Bang, Pang!

Smoke.

Recoil, shear,

Sigh. Period.

Math !

2007-07-06T10:16:00.000-07:00

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 !

2007-07-01T10:39:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-06-12T11:54:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-10T02:23:00.001-07:00

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.

Pins, Needles and Peace - II

2007-05-28T11:01:00.000-07:00

He donned the headphone and closed his eyes. The little girl with hair cut like a boy’s flashed across his mind’s eye. The girl who shouted her presence in a group of similar aged girls and who loved to watch airplanes whoosh past, who bullied her chums with such sweetness, it made his heart ache to think of it. She was his baby, his childhood. The song he was listening to linked it all. He had avoided the song for a long time and he knew he would break down even if he heard it 10 years later with his daughter in his lap. He was certain, and he wanted to break down now. The song was a requiem of his childhood and also its sweetest reminder. It helped him cry, give a vent to the most held back emotions and for that he felt a certain gratitude to the man who composed it. Sometimes the images – images of her holding his hand claiming to know to read hands and him stealing glances at the straightest parting of hair he had ever seen and falling madly in love with it – the images so filled his head he had to open his eyes to breathe. And if he thought back with a clearer mind, breathless was what he was most of the time he was with her. Had he been blind? He couldn’t think. The song faded off. He didn’t want to hear it again. He wanted to save it for a later time. He took off the headphones, opened his moist eyes and smiled.

Pins, Needles and Peace

2007-05-05T07:14:00.000-07:00

I think I had lost her even before I could discover her to the extent I desired, craved. If I started telling you from the time the craving started, I would end up seeming like Humbert Humbert from Nabokov's Lolita. Not so hopeless, but close. I could always go further and be a spectacle for even Humbert Humbert to sit back and disport himself. That, in fact, was very much in the cards if she had said a few words more, out of context, or did a few things she did with her best friends in their jolliest moments, spent a moment more than necessary or simply made herself more comfortable while we shared the same air to breathe. Maybe she did say and do all that. Maybe I was just blind. But lo! hindsight isn't much use in such cases. Just that you wouldn't want to hear a 'you-never-understood' when you talk to her about all the craziness in retrospection, as a friend. Friend!
And did I hear that? Ha! If everything I wished against turned into whores, I'd be the greatest fishmonger today. I am almost there.
I would amuse myself by such fantasies as she asking me if we had a future, us lying on the ice of a frozen lake holding hands, watching stars, ( this was the time I watched ' The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind' ) and me replying , joining the stars for my constellation, that we had a future just as time and space - infinite and unknown ( this was also the time I read 'A Brief History of Time', Stephan Hawking ). But she wouldn't reply. She wouldn't reply even in my fantastic amusements and satisfy me with something as brusque as a false giggle and a 'shut the fuck up!' (oh! how the movie affected me!) . That was how used to I was to her original brusqueness , particularly and especially, when it was me. Ofcourse the "do we have a future" was the length and breadth my fantasies would go.
Where did I want the desire, the craving for the discovery of the girl I saw everyday to take me to? The answer in my feeble mind was always an obvious one: marriage. So dearly had I wanted her once that I never realized I could lose her , although I guess it always pried in my subconscious. So when I found out and concluded ( I really didn't have anything else to do with the freshest piece of evidence ) that I had lost her from all possibilities of discovery, I barely moved. As if I was expecting it all through even after her "you-never-understood". The subconscious, I say! Such a bitch. I could atleast be sad. Now I did not even move.

2007-04-18T07:14:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-01-25T19:46:00.000-08:00

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?

2006-12-11T12:47:00.000-08:00

I can see a few rays of light. They are so bright, so blinding that I am afraid I might lose way. Fffuck!

***********************************************************************************

I am the kind of person who would start writing a long story about that sparrow on the window sill and end up with a short story of my own childhood. And happy with the product. Or not. But still it has to be a short story. I digress way too much for a long story. Like fuck you should care. So much wish wash for a month? Neah.

************************************************************************************

A female once told me that I reminded her of Hari from Chetan Bhagat's Five Point Someone. I still don't know what I should be feeling about it. What I know though is that it hasn't made me buy the book. Thank you, my lassitude. Oh, by the way a friend once said I reminded him of some character from some book by Dostoevsky. I haven't read that book, either. Fuck you, my lassitude.

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What do you call a "ILU Shobha" graffiti on the wall of a train compartment?

A guy's orgasm of emotions. Poor Shobha.

# 32

2006-11-19T08:31:00.000-08:00

A friend met a friend and asked," Dude, what you doing these days?"
"Hunting"
"Oh?"
"Yeah, job hunting."
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"Enough books for a lifetime, eh?"
"Umm...guess yeah."
Thinking about it, how is one supposed to feel when you think that the books that you own now, at 22, are the books you are going to be talking about, say like when you are 60. Depressing? Not very gorgeous, atleast?
Well, I have like 650 -700 books ( hardbacks, e-books all inclusive ) here in front of me and it's not a very uplifting sight, in a sense.

Of vodka and apple juice...

2006-10-04T23:04:00.000-07:00

...and I almost forgot the username.

"...So, whats up?", she asked.
"Oh, an overly glamorous life. A few girlfriends here and there, some one night stands and the such."
I was as pleased at the reply as a child would be after calling someone a name his mom had especially warned him against and especially after he was name called first.
She knew, and I believe pretty much everyone knows, that there is as little a probability of anything mega or atleast something worth telling happening in my life, as something not happening in a hot girl's life.
Hot girls and me. Vodka and pickle juice. Diabolical in a certain way, the species are. So much more the perceived availability, that much more the tangible unavailability. Take for example the case of this girl...umm...I'd call her more classy than hot. Since classy is hot for me, she is hotter than a lit cigarette tip. Percieved available for what now seems to be a genuinely infantile rationale. The rationale being that she agreed for a cup of tea the first time she was asked. That also was the second time we talked. Very big deal no? Pah, no! The story, as a matter of fact ends there. Nice tea, great conversation, thank you sir - hence second time tea? No sir, 'I just had apple juice'.
I am starting to believe in the theory of a single creator. Special designers for the genus and the species. Lack of imagination can be an attribute to these designers for their creations are aall the same. Or atleast perceivably same because we ordinaries are all the same. Not our fault, though. We are just born , not created.

2006-07-15T10:22:00.000-07:00

200 killed in a country of a billion and a half. Big deal? I have heard people condemning the rest of the resilient us waking up the next morning, forgetting about the previous day and walking to work. What is wrong in it? I mean, isn’t it wonderful that you are alive and breathing and getting to see what unfolds? Isn’t it wonderful that you are getting to blog and comment and appear smart about the whole thing? Isn’t it wonderful to think that the air you are breathing might as well carry the scent of blood the next moment and that you are privileged to breathe now? What is wrong then in living and sleeping and waking up and going to work when you get to? Can you be sure you are not one of the 200 in the next blast? I can very well imagine 199 of those 200 thanking God and going to work the very next day after the Ghatkopar blasts, after the Gateway of India blasts, after the Mulund blasts, after the ’93 blasts, just like us.

This is precisely called slow poisoning. You kill 200 in a country of a billion and a half and it hardly matters. The agendas are met and not a feather is moved. You see every man worth a dime commenting and appearing smart, every channel theorizing brand new theories till they get enough air-time to fill their pockets and every politician condemning the acts and seizing the opportunity to gain precious political points. This goes on for a week or two and then suddenly everything takes a backseat and everything is forgotten because its elections at so-and-so. So what is wrong if I wake up the very next morning and go on with my life than be a mere hypocrite?

The whole attitude, though, is like thanking heavens for letting you live for just one more day or a minute. Being a reasonable being, one would rather value his life and take control of it than live at the mercy of heavens. But how and when does one begin to value his life if even such incidents don't move as much as a whisker? What is required here is a shock so huge, everyone becomes a victim. So that there's no space left for resilience, no place to go and nothing to do but revolt. Revolt for our own lives and for a change. A 200 people here and a 50 people there, dead or alive, don’t bring about a revolution or even a minor change, quite evidently.

Instead of doing your fireworks here and there, why don’t you nuke us, fellas? Why don’t you, for our sake? Some place where it hurts a little less but which would shock us out of our pants and make us get to the road than to work. All of us.

2006-06-21T11:48:00.000-07:00

There are moments in your life which you always want to hold onto. Moments, so special, they seem to define in a single instant all the joy that is there in your life. Times, at which when you look back, they seem to be posters of your favorite classic movie. And a song to associate with them. Memories so beautiful, your heart aches.

Mundane activities gain special meaning just because it was shared by someone close to you. The most ordinary seems extraordinary just because you know someone had felt the same way about it. You feel good to be alive. The air around you seems so fresh, you overbreathe. Life, at times, does seem beautiful even with all its imperfections. Or maybe, the imperfections make it seem more beautiful. Such an irony. You live for the future but the past, your memories, gives your life all its meaning.

2006-05-02T10:38:00.000-07:00

Misery has no face
In her sorrows she’s hidden away
The life that teemed a seemly grace
Did bid away her living days
Misery has no choice
In defying joy she dishonors God
And falls from heaven’s lofty perch
To flow in the river of thoughtless indecision.

Weaving, weaving, forever weaving
A tapestry of lost grace.

My Misery. The darling who taught me to live, to survive, to breathe. The angel, my company for four years. And now she is backing away. The end of a bittersweet relationship. The ones where the parties involved invariably get back for a reunion. I'll welcome her, for she taught me to live, to survive, to breathe. For she is my God.

The Great Gig in the Sky

2006-04-23T08:30:00.000-07:00

A lady in a white dress floating like a silk ribbon in an infinite silver-white gray-black sky, stretching across its vastness, holding onto nothing. A man in black shades standing in an ashened earth, looking at the sky, at the ribbon, the lady. This is the image I get every time I hear TGGITS. Effigies of anxiousness, of loneliness, of hurt and of all that I set to achieve and I could not, of death keep flashing before me like nasty ogres.
It’s like seeing your own dead self. How would it feel? To see yourselves dying. Lonely, underachieved, holding onto life, which is past you. Chilling. The lady is me. And the man is me too. Right now, I am afraid to face death and so I can’t face life. Explains why he is wearing black shades.

2006-04-20T02:30:00.000-07:00

It's not been a long time since I last visited blogger. I visited it yesterday. My blogpage. She was just there, sitting pretty, my black beauty, untouched, still holding her cherry intact except for one small instance of violation at the top. Her stats have changed little over time, except for small changes here and there in her profile. "You can see me, but you can't touch" - that's what she seems to scream with every pore of her black skin. So people come , see her in profile, take a peek, sometimes do a boo and run. Just run!
But to the ones who choose to stay back, to suffer, oh, how different she is. A perfect host. Does the welcome, white smiles all around. Smiles which throw away a whole lot of her, or so it seems. Fastidious to some, dapper to some and ugly to some. She accepts all in her vanity, unawares to what the world thinks. "Stay on", she says, "and you might as well have a good time. But hey, thats no guarantee - you can go deeper, discover me and I know you will not touch me - I suck , and you can leave if you want. Theres a lot of doors there in the right. You can choose any and I hope you had a good stay."
Slut in the mind, chaste otherwise. My da'ling, neglected blog!

2006-03-30T12:57:00.000-08:00

A familiar cry of the engine. Road lay down itself for you like a slave, like a whore. Use and They shall abuse. Trees pass by like strokes of a painter’s brush. Faceless beings like specks of dirt on a white canvas. The shadow of you on a thick cloud of exhaust breathed out from your latest pursuit. Forth ho, before you are lost.

A crooked scooter waiting for his master. A murdered [1] truck, his master lost. Many beads of red on its face. Free and happy and dead. Woman riding the pillion. Hip drawn back, chest ahead. Cheek resting on a cushion. Rider resting on a softer one. Cog up, move ahead. What you see is what you don’t get.

A proud dog barks. A prouder one sleeps, in a pool of sauce. Liver out, eyes in. Red, hot bitch. Highway to another (spell-check: a nether) world.

[1]: Murdered by whom, one might ask. Mr. McFate of course, who else?

2006-03-18T01:25:00.000-08:00

Your only defence against your own people is sleep. A long, long, long sleep.

2006-02-12T11:04:00.000-08:00

I stood at the balcony sipping a cup of coffee , looking at a child playing with her plastic football. The unfinished concrete floor she was trotting on barely seemed to bite her naked feet. Or even if it did, she din't seem to care. Every moment she spent seemed to be moments of unadultered joy, of consummate innocence. One second Time seemed to fly by, another second i looked at her and Time seemed to stop by and join me in the audience , to watch something as pure as that. Maybe the floor was watching too and enjoying the touch of her cushy feet and in the indulgence had forgotten it's prick.
Her grandfather was watering the plants in a small garden surrounding the apartment. The gush of water, from whatever space was left between his thumb and the tip of the pipe, seemed to be as welcome for the plants as for the water escaping the pipe. He seemed to establish some sort of connection with the plants through the water, a smile that would'nt leave his face. A smile which suggested contentment at the way life treated him. At the way all the events leading to his retirement lined up to salute him. The smile of an old man content with life can easily be confused with the smile of one prepared for the eventual, I thought. What could possibly defeat such a man? The smile had to be there.
The water trickled down from the leaves to the concrete floor and formed a neat stream. The sun glistened its edges and it moved lazily, sometimes hither sometimes thither, like a man with no particular deadline to meet. It moved, melanizing the floor along its path. And as it moved further, it broke off into two parallel streams. The streams seemed to look longingly at each other like they never wished to be separated. They never imagined that they could even have a separate existence. They had never bothered to make one out from the other. Even the floor seemed to cry for them and the tears seemed to be the streams themselves.
But then something happened. Maybe it was the wind. Maybe a slight slope. Or maybe, just maybe it was their longing. They were no longer parallel. They meandered towards each other.And as they neared, one stream for once showed a sense of urgency. The other reciprocated and the next second they moved along lazily again, as one. Again as two bodies, one soul. A sweet pang in my chest. The nature seemed to smile at the stream. The Sun shined ever so mildly, not wanting to dry them off and the floor did his best by nudging them through a slope as if sending them for a honeymoon.

2006-01-25T21:08:00.000-08:00

The mobile made a merry beep. Sameer scuffled over the bed, scrambling for the damn thing. A rude jerk from the indulgence of an early morning dream. The blanket seemed to pamper him and for an instant he thought there would be no place on earth more comfortable than that. With eyes half open, the eyelids playing a tug-of-war with itself, he pressed some random keys on the mobile. The bright light of the mobile hit him on his eyes and for once he hated himselves for buying a nuisance. 4.40 am shouted the device. Which meant he was 10 minutes behind schedule even before he had woken up. He got up, threw the blanket to the other side and walked towards the window. A bird flew across the horizon. He felt as though the sky was a huge screen and someone was projecting the bird’s image from behind. A silhouette. The morning was still in deep slumber. Nothing seemed to disturb it.

Sameer walked across the room to the basin. There he stood looking at the mirror for a few seconds. He had slept at 3 the same morning .The thought of which made him want to slump back to the bed again. A million other thoughts populated his mind in an instant like the products of a fission reaction. None seemed urgent, none was important. His hands seemed to be a mechanical robot, brushing the teeth for him. By the time he had finished, he was awake. He splashed a handful of water on his face and again and allowed it to work its magic on him, the way it does to flowers. He could instantly feel freshness all around him. He left his face undried , allowing the drops of water to do a face massage while it rolled from the forehead , over the eyes along the nose to the chin and below.
He changed to his tracksuits, slipped in the sneakers and was ready for the morning trot. The mobile beeped again, this time a missed ring from Nayan to inform him that he was ready too. They met below the building, smiled a good morning and set off.

They talked as they jogged. The early morning breeze swept gently across their face, over the forehead and the hairline, in an attempt, they thought, which defined their face from the rest of the body. They moved ahead, sometimes in a silent competition. They kept moving, the legs tired but the mind at its briskest best. A realization of how the mind tires one’s body more than any other part and how the mind propels you to keep moving how much ever any other part is tired. A testimony to the power of man’s will power. A thought of a navy diver from the movie “Men of Honor”. You don’t stop until your mind decides to. One’s mind. One’s god. They looked at each other. They exactly knew when the other wanted to stop. Silent conversation.

2006-01-22T02:12:00.000-08:00

You stare at the monitor. You are compelled to write. You are pregnant with ideas. They all seem to be so clear till the moment your fingers touch the keyboard. Everythings gone. All you are left with is some very vague pictures of your originally clear ideas. You have it in your mind, still. You try to translate them into words. You can't find the right words. Every line written seems like an accomplishment. You read back. The lines seem to be just rot. You delete everything. You start over again. Now you are even more compelled to write. Now you cant complete even a line. Every single word has to be thought of. Every sentence has to be painfully strung together to make them sound coherent. You wonder why you are taking all the pain. But you can't go away. You thought you were good at something and you can't even do that. Writer's block phoenix says. But im not even a writer. Im nowhere as good as some others. Atleast you could express. Now you can't do that. You think everyone else is good. You don't think you are bad. But you think everyone else is good. Doesnt help you. In the meanwhile you realise some new ideas are trying to find their way in. Into your head. They seem to grow by the second. You sense them, you feel them, you think over them. You feel liberated. You wanna record these atleast. You run to the computer. You type the first word. The fingers seem reluctant to move. You push them hard. Somehow, one's fingers dont get along very nicely with one's ideas. Your head is pregnant again. You stare at the monitor. Helpless.

Banda n Adi - Episode 1

2006-01-06T10:30:00.000-08:00

The people mentioned here is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely the writer's lack of imagination.

Adityaraj had the makings of a poet. He was sensitive, observant,
philosophical,rational and all that except that he dint write poems. He was considered to be a great listener among his group of friends.The one who could be approached when all one wished to do was whine. He was healthy and well rounded too, as people would euphemise his framework. He had a head to go with his extravagant body. No, he was not a fathead. In the contrary, he was as smart as any guy would like to be. He had an aura ( for some reason, my dictionary defines aura as: " A sensation that precedes the onset of certain disorders such as a migraine attack or epileptic seizure. Well it also has another meaning which is," An indication of radiant light drawn around the head of a saint ". I obviously, meant the latter ) about him that charmed most of the guys he met. It wont be wrong to say that he was conscious of this charm and charisma and was at times nonplussed about himselves. Good enough, for a young chap like him the excitement was quite natural.
All said, like everyone,Adi, as he was fondly called had his share of worries too.Or was it craving? Maybe craving. He craved for a distaff shade in his life. The shade which when absent in a virile makes him seem the most uninteresting and boring. As boring as the straight line. Adi craved for the curves.But,the ascetic personna he was, he never let the craving get the better of him,atleast in public places and wag his tongue and go "woof-woof" when a female figure passed by. Not until he met a certain gentleman called Naveen.
Naveen or Banda as he is popularly known was one tall, dark and handsome (TDH) hunk every girl would drool over, ideally. He believed that too. But then things that are ideal remains that. So by 21, it was no surprise that Banda had developed a tendency to whistle over his shoulder and appear all orgasmic and sometimes moan too when an eve passed by. All too involuntarily. A " 'hey, I'm Naveen' - 'hey, I'm engaged' " convo had become all too common to even become part of a joke when his group met. But, that dint dishearten him. Infact nothing ever disheartened Banda. He was the eternal optimist. The guy who believed that there was a great barn of horses nearby when he was drowned neckdeep in horseshit , the guy who called spade a spade. Such an extraordinary individual was difficult to be missed even in a huge crowd. So it was only a matter of time before Adi met Banda. Both were in the same college and both were extraordinary in their own rights. Now mathematically, a negative and negative makes positive and a positive and positive also makes p. So put either way ,the confluence guaranteed a summation of ideologies and other states of the mind which was sure to,if i may use the word,bother a few. So when Naveen talked about the Tarannums and other bar-girls, when he drooled and whistled and howled and moaned at every passing female, age being not a bar here, Adi merely seconded him. At times they could be heard debating over what the girl who just passed by should have been wearing (looks, dress all considered) for her to look more sultry, among other issues of contemporary importance.
Time passed by thus and both the protagonists were having a ball, in the sense fun, that Banda hollered something which made the ascetic one smile a pleased smile. Whether he kissed Banda on his forehead would remain a mystery. Banda had hollered out a plan. A plan to go to Goa and do some "soul searching" there.

End of episode 1.

p.s: Because the writer expects hostility from the protagonists (yeah yeah they are fictional all right, but you can never say who feels offended) he deems it best to present an episode wise account of the two friends rather than packing everything into a single post and getting mutilated for life. err...mutiliation in capsule format is not something that the writer is new to.

Honour in the light

2005-12-30T21:59:00.000-08:00

Came across demi ray's post about honour killing of 4 young girls in Pakistan. With the new year beckoning and with hindsight to our advantage, it won't be a bad idea to look at where we are headed. This sure might be an isolated incident, but an uncivilized one all the same.

These young girls were not simply daughters conceived by men. They were borne and nurtured into existence by a mother. She -- the mother -- could do nothing more than stand by her man as he slit their little throats.

To say there is an unhealthy, unrealistic perception of sex – as ‘sex’ is loosely defined as ‘women’ – is to put it mildly. For centuries, this patriarchal perversion has been festering in the dark like an ignored cancer, adapting to its debilitating pain and unsightly lumps, growing stronger in endurance, but weaker in health, isolated from examination for fear of the major surgery it will require to remedy it and ultimately, justified by the societal function this disease serves – the family unit, with a mother that will never run away from household duties.

That’s not exactly how women are inspired to unconditional love. It’s so easy to activate a woman’s loyalty and devotion, I marvel at the cavemen who think they need to cripple a woman in order to keep her around. And undoubtedly, that works, too. Women are abused to greater and lesser degrees all over the country and all over the world.

The criminal in this case, however, now has two sons to carry on his name with ‘honor’ in tact – and a criminal justice system that defends him. Matters like this are perceived as 'family disputes' and men are inherently the household disciplinarians. What have the sons just learned? The mother, has a private, silent psychological and emotional torment to contend with. Mothers don’t ‘recover’ and bounce-back from things like that. What has been reinforced for her?

We all find ways to justify our behavior – even cold-blooded ‘pre-emptive’ murder can and is justified in the mind of the criminal. He killed young girls who don’t even know what menstruation is in anticipation of the day they ‘will’ have dishonorable sex. For centuries, this deviation has grown and festered in the dark.

When the Qur’an was being revealed to the 7th century Arab pagans, one of their ‘directives’ was to stop burying their live newborn baby girls. That was a common practice back in those days. I don’t know how long it took to stop these live burials, but we don’t hear about this practice in Arab countries, any longer. However, if the root of what motivated this live burial of females is not eradicated, it could simply ‘evolve’ as another gender-based crime, such as burying ‘adulterous’ women in sand up to their necks so that stones could be thrown at the only exposed part of her body. This was a Middle-Eastern practice, described in the Bible as well, that Jews – and their counterpart Christians – have moved past.

Hang your head down in shame. We belong to the same race.
We can only hope such news does'nt make the headlines in 2006.

p.s: Police in Multan said they would complete their investigation into Ahmed's (the girls' father) case in the next two weeks and that he faces the death sentence if he is convicted for the killings and terrorizing his neighborhood.

Would be interesting to see how things turn out, the country taken into consideration

Santa's Letter

2005-12-24T07:58:00.000-08:00

Christmas brings with it the portly figured, the jolly old, the one with the supernatural ability to ascend a chimney with a mere nod of his head, Santa.And with him comes aunty Claus with recipes so delectable, they seem like god's gift to the gastric juices.Yammy! But let Mrs Claus' recipes not make me wander off the subject of the post. So talking about Santa , although this guy is all fun to watch and talk about, i've never been able to come up with a satisfactory theory to support his existence. So when northpole.com shouted that one could write a letter to Santa and he would most definitely get back, i found the entire idea fishy.
Nevertheless, i decided to write the old man the letter and maybe take a stab at pulling his leg too. Following the specified links ,i reached the page from where i could send the letter.Send the letter i could, but not before i answered a few friendly questions.It asked if i've been naughty or nice through the year. Not the one to take chances, i decided that i was nice throughout. The next question, i should say, perplexed me a bit. Did i have a chimney in my house? Now these are times when Mumbai doesnt even have space for a gas-stove.So the chimney was no doubt a difficult proposition. I decided that the exhaust fan in the kitchen was a very good substitute for the chimney and Santa would be logical enough to understand. I checked "yes". Good enough. Next, i had to choose from a variety of toys, the one which i wished the most for Christmas. Not difficult given the options.Stuffed toys and toy trains being some of the choices. I chose cars and trucks. Next step, i had to enter my wishlist. After entering the initial four wishes, i noticed that the list was unfulfillable even by Santa's standards. I mean, even if he could, he would'nt. The four wishes were names of four actresses.(I would have named them . But going by the heavy popularity of this blog, i fear the people concerned might read this too and sue me for their own convenient reasons.) Moving along , i finally reached the " write a special message for Santa" section. I wrote, "Dear Santa, i hope the cars and trucks mentioned above are the real ones and not some stuffed toys. Am just curious how you are gonna come driving the cars and trucks via the chimney. Anyways, take care."
I sent the letter , hoping that my doubts about the old one's existence were wrong and that he came by on Christmas eve (via the chimney or wherever else he wanted to),the fleet of cars and trucks following him.
The letter i sent yesterday and the matter had slowly started to vapourise from my rather humble RAM that a friend of mine mentioned something about Santa today. Flicker-Flicker went the overhead tubelight and next second,i was in front of the PC. Sure enough, i had got a reply from Santa( supposedly him ). The letter went like this:
"
Dear Sujith,

Thank you for writing such a wonderful letter! We have had a great year at the North Pole. The reindeer have been playing reindeer games to get in shape for the long trip Christmas Eve, and the elves have been busy getting my sleigh packed with lots and lots of toys.

Once my sleigh is packed and ready to go, I'll be off on my journey around the world. I'm reading your letter right now, and it looks like you've been a very nice boy this year. That makes me so happy. Keep up the good work!

While you are asleep on Christmas Eve, the reindeer will land my sleigh on your rooftop so I can hop down your chimney.

I see that you like cars and trucks. I like cars and trucks, too. They are lots of fun to play with, and we have some very exciting new cars and trucks this year. The elves have been very busy this year making many new and different cars and trucks for Christmas!

Well, I must get back to my workshop now and help the elves finish up the rest of the Christmas toys. We have to have them ready to go soon--we don't have a minute to lose!

Ho! Ho! Ho! Have a Merry Christmas!

Your Special Friend,
Santa
"

I never thought "Dear Santa.....take care" made a great letter.Oh well.The next few lines seemed to be of little interest to me what with him blabbering about his reindeers and elves and sleighs and toys.He had already made plans to park his reindeer run sleigh on my rooftop and then come hopping down through the chimney. I hoped i could somehow inform him that i dint really have a chimney and he could possibly come down by stairs. The next para was to be the most important for me. But this one , infact, turned out to be the real dampner. The alliteration of "cars and trucks" confirmed my doubts about the fishiness of the entire "send a letter and we'll get back" thing. It was quite obviously a computer generated letter.;-( The spirits touching ground level i read the para once again, now replacing "cars and trucks" with "girls". This once done, the spirits had taken an about turn northwards and i could be seen smiling and beaming at every soul near me, strangers included,a fresh hope of the man in red turning up with all his "goodies" !

Merry Christmas Guys!

Blog-Hopping

2005-12-16T02:36:00.000-08:00

Bloghopping can be fun.Especially when you use that top rightmost link of a blog to go to the next one.The catch being you seldom,very seldom land in an indian's blog.Even if you do, it would be a resume by an indian wannabe IT professional (mind you,just the resume.Not a word more, not a word less.And then exactly 1 comment saying that the resume is beautiful by the person himselves.)or another one which would be so devoid of any creativity(ok,might be asking for too much here.How about some proper english grammar?) you start scrambling for that top rightmost link.But the way i am, i love misery.I love to see people struggling to stay alive in deep seas by trying the butterfly stroke.Not that i am a sadist.Its just that the situations can be amazingly funny.Imagine a Laloo trying to speak with the Queen.The misery i am talking about.
And then,coming back,you also get to learn your basics of a myriad of languages.And then talk-back too with the comments section.Take for example a particular blog whose profile said the owner was italian.I merrily jumped into the blog which shouted this:

" dai mi fai entrare? conosco franco lo potresti chiamare? dai... La city dei locali fighetti regala sempre soddisfazioni ieri sera festone aziendale dei signori che offrono questa piattaforma...

The first line made me wonder if some tamilian was trying to make fun of me what with the word "dai" doing an alliteration.Further reading convinced me that it was not tamil.I read the stuff again and thought,"Can't agree more with the guy!". Then just to let him know that i had visited him,i posted a comment saying,"hey! nice blog!"

Another hop and i saw myselves in an aunty's blog.The aunty, it seemed had decided to get all naughty for the day by posting some pictures in situations which normal people,who have not decided to get naughty,wouldnt take.I could'nt resist myselves from commenting there too.
"hey!nice blog!"
If by any chance,this aunty decides to come to my blog and comment anything at all, i am sure i am gonna lose my already low readership (my previous two posts boasts of an amazing 2 comments each.Thanks Guys!)of cultured (zii...cultured can also mean biologically cultured if not mentally!) people.

At the doc

2005-12-14T08:21:00.000-08:00

"Is it paining, Sujith?"
No answer.
"Come on Sujith, tell me is it paining?"
From whatever life that was left of me, I struggled to open my mouth wider than the dentist had already helped it to.
"Yeaah", and nearly fainted.
In between visions of Uranus and Jupiter and the other stars, I saw the letters "k", "u", "f", "c" floating around in the moonlit sky, with the third and the first letter getting disturbingly repetitive by the minute.
"What happened? You seemed to be in a lot of pain." The friendly dentist asked me while washing his hands in the basin.
I tried to smile which I am sure looked more sour than at those times when I had alum cubes mistaking it for lump sugar.
"Actually I dint expect you to inject me there"
He guffawed.
I smiled too, an evil one now.The thoughts on my mind clearly reflecting in my smile.
What if i took one of his injections and stabbed it into his gums, just the way he did, while he was laughing.I'll also have a great excuse not to visit the devil again.But, sadly enough my human instincts took over and so did my wretched worries.
My voice cracked when I asked him, "When is my next appointment?"
"Oh, come over the day after.We can set this permanently next time"
"Will I be injected again there?"
"Its like, I've never seen a longer root canal. It has to be perfectly clean before I start filling it up.And you are bleeding too. So I cant work on it long enough.Maybe just one more time.And then you are through."
The situation which I found myselves in precisely described when to have mixed emotions.The joy of being on a small vacation from hell,the thought of having to come back again and be injected and screwed and bolted again and then get a permanent vacation.The worser situations weighed down on me and I could feel emotions swelling up in my heart as I walked back. The swell gave way to tears when I saw mom.
"He fu....he doesnt know his work ma"
"It happens da.Just one more time and your through.Then you'll be all too fine."
"I have to. Or else the guy is in for some deep trouble."
Mom chuckled and I tried to chuckle too.

The dentist episode happened some months back.I never thought I would have to go through the situation again in my life.
A deep cut on my leg yesterday only helped relive the whole episode again. After dressing up the wound, I told the doc that I found the tape that he had stuck rather inconvenient.Before I looked hither and started to go back thither something happened which made me scream "oucch" and kick the assistant doc.
The guy, the very active guy, had pulled off the tape off my skin and in the process waxed that part of my leg.

Aloha Confusion!

2005-12-11T10:51:00.000-08:00

I decided to sleep at 11 pm the day before the last exam and wake up at 1 am. Blankets on.Lights off.
Time: 11.20 The mobile goes beep.My jiju was online.
"Hello,suji"
"Yeah chettan, what happened?"
"You remember the girl you were with during the floods?"
I was not quite expecting two words which he said - "girl" and "floods". So after hmmming for 5 seconds i figured out what he was saying.Although i was with 3 girls on the day of floods, i dint want to argue about it on the phone with him especially at midnight. So i thought up about one particular chick among the three and continued the convo.
"Yeah,i do. What happened?"
"Her Dad called up. It seems she's lost her cell in the train and has asked her dad to ask you to ask the customer service to deactivate her account"
Confusion struck me right from the first line. Why did he call jiju and not me? How the hell did he have jiju's number and not mine?Maybe he liked him better. What the hell. Then again, why did she ask her dad to ask me to ask the CSE? Why not she do it herselves?And more importantly,why cant she call me up directly? Maybe she doesnt like me.What the hell.So i decide to call her up and clear things up myselves.
First call:
"hello. (Laughs). How careless can people get!" How did it happen? "
"Who the sam hill is this?"
"24XXXXX ? "
"NO!"
"Extremely sorry." (i say that with the meekest voice possible.)

Second call:
"hello.(doesnt laugh).24XXXXX? "
"Yeah,sujith. What happened? This time?"
"Yeah.Your dad called up jiju. How did it happen? "
"How did what happen? What are you talking about,sujith? And why would my dad call up your jiju? "
"Exactly. Why would he! But you should have been more careful yaar."
"Dude,you mind telling me where i was careless? Sujith, seriously are you drunk?" (chuckles)
"Looks like you lost your mind alongwith your mobile.Offcourse i'm not drunk."
"Mobile? I have my cell very much with me.Oh, so you want me to call you up.You are playing the fool 'cuz i've not been calling you.Right?"
"Not right.So you didnt lose your cell? And your dad dint call up my jiju?"
"No. No." (chuckles again)
"Okay.Nevermind.So hows life? Hows jayu? Not smsed her for a long time."
"Oh jayu, she boarded the train today from M.P"
Suddenly my tubelight tried to flicker and light up.
"Okie.Then probably jayu lost her cell.And probably it was her dad."
"Why are you behind everyones cell and dad? Am sure you are not in your senses today.I'll call you tommorow when you have got your sense back.Okay?
"Okay.Btw, im totally fine.You dont understand."
"Whatever.Bbye and goodnight."
"Bye."
Jaw resting on my palms,the elbow on the knees,eyes askance,i sit to think.Things had become just a bit more vague now. So in an attempt to sort out things once and for all,i tried calling up jayu's mobile.
"Out of coverage area", said the computer aunty.
Tried her landline number. Time: 11.35 pm.
"Hello?"
"hello?" (i hear a male voice.It was jayus dad.)
"Hello uncle, jayus there?"
"No, she's gone to M.P.Would be reaching here only tommorow."
"Oh i see.She called you up after boarding the train?"
"Yeah"
"So she must definitely be having the cell with her.Just wanted to call her up.Was not able to get through.Thats why."( Obviously i dint want him to be tensed about something which by now seemed an artwork of imagination)
"No.She called from her colleagues mobile.She lost her's."
"Oh really?.What happened?"
"Actually what happened na...wait...whos this? "
The last two words stunned me for a moment.In the heat of the moment,i had not introduced myselves and he had not noticed it...till that moment.
"Oh, im sujith"
"Oh, sujith! I called up your jiju sometime back.Actually jayu lost her cell and she dint remember any number.We had your jiju's number here but couldnt find yours. So asked him to inform you about it."
"Yeah he did.So should i ask the CSE to deactivate the account?"
"Yeah please,can you do that?
"Sure why not uncle."
"And you'll inform me after you've done it?"
"okay"
Now assuming that because it was her cell, the simcard would also be regsitered in her name, i called up the CSE.
After the pain in the ass IVRs and four failed calls, i finally got through to a human voice at 12 am.I explained the problem to him and he sounded only too eager to help me out till this happened:
"Sir,but for deactivating, you'll hafta answer some security questions about the number you want to deactivate"
Great! I almost always had trouble answering security questions about my own simcard,what with questions like the day of last recharged and stuff.But after all the trouble of getting through to the CSE, i couldnt just back out.So there i was answering security questions about jayus simcard.
"Sir, could you please help me with her address?"
Although i knew where she stayed,i dint know the area name, building name or any name except her name.But i had to answer it.
"Its...hmm...is it near agarwal hall?"
"Right sir. Could you please help me a bit more?"
"hmmm...agarwal hall...dombivli?"
"Exactly.Could you tell me the name of the building sir?"
"No, i dont know that."
"The last recahrge?"
"Sorry.No idea"
"Date of birth?"
"June 14th?"
"No, sir"
"July 14th?"
"No, sir"
"Some 14th.Right?"
"No sir."
"The simcard is registered to jayu(off course thats not her name!).Right?"
"No, sir."
"What???"
"Its registered to T.S.G."
"What???"
Not wanting to be reported for making hoax calls for deactivating peoples mobile account, i hung up instantly.I figured out that T.S.G would have to be jayus dad and her simcard, for some weird reason was registered in her dad's name and not her's.
So called up T.S.G. uncle a second time to take all the data that might be required.
Then called up the CSE again and finally got the account deactivated.Feeling mighty successful i called up T.S.G. uncle again to inform him about the deactivation.
"Thank you so much for all the trouble sujith."
"Oh,it was easy uncle.No problem at all."
Episode end: 12.30 am. Goes to sleep.Wakes up at 1 am to switch off the alarm and goes to sleep again.

Help the story grow...

2005-11-23T01:03:00.000-08:00

One idea leads to another.The entire tagging episode did just that to me.Like tagging,i have got an idea which is some kind of a group activity.And unlike tagging, it requires a bit of creativity.The idea is to make a chain story here, on blogs.
The entire thing is supposed to work like this:

Person A (suppose thats me for the moment) writes a few sentences which can form a part of a story.After i am done, i pass on the story to someone alongwith the central emotion the story is expected to carry.
Like, i write, " Once there used to be a ... (emotion: humour) "So the guy who picks up the story from here is expected to add a few humorous lines and leave it for the next person.The next person does the same and a new story would be born.There has to be ofcourse some rules about any game.This one has some too:

1) Only one person should continue a certain part.Like after i've written, if B plans to continue from there, B will put a comment on my post saying he/she is gonna continue.Once thats put,person C should visit Bs blog and continue from there.

2) The contnuity of the story has to be maintained for gods sake.Good creativity should be of essence here.

3)Theres really no limitation on how many sentences one can write.But atleast 10 words is a must. :-)

4)While B continues from where A left off, B'll have to copy paste A's part into his/her blog before he/she continues from thereon.

5)I presume that after a while,it'll be difficult for a newbie to track through all the blogs.Just to make the task easy,this link will take you to the secondlast blog which carried the story.Secondlast because of the continuity factor.The above link would be updated as and when a part moves from one blog to another.

Thats all i can think of now.Any changes that has to be brought about can be put as a comment.

Lemme get the ball rolling right now...

On an exceptionally pleasant afternoon,in the comforts of his room...(emotion:humour)

Goo !

2005-10-29T21:48:00.000-07:00

I knew he was beyond normal the very first time i met him. It was the engineering admission's option form submission day. Guru was standing on platform no. 3 talking to one of our common friends (CF) who also was going to submit the form alongwith me and him. The first time i looked at him, i could notice an air of authority about him. Both hands dug deep in the trouser pcokets , standing erect like a stick and looking the least interested in what CF was saying. At one time, CF said something and was thundering with laughter while guru stood their , not as much as a smile on his face. This interested me about him. He would not laugh at peoples nonsense , something which very few people do.
Noticing that CF had seen me , i went up to talk up with them , hoping to share my worries about the admissions. For some reason i asked Guru for his option form. It was more of an answer for " what are your dream branch-college combos " than a practical one. But not wanting to disappoint him , i said "Wow ! Am sure you'll get selected to atleast one of those." As usual, guru seemed least bothered about my comment. He looked up at my option form too , which i thought was atleast a bit more practical than his. His comment? A huge guffaw. Then tells me, " Dude, you are not getting selected at any of those. You better go home if you are gonna submit this form." That to an individual he had met up only a few minutes ago.As it turned out , i actually did not get selected anywhere and neither did he. But it was clear. He lacked social sense.And he was not afraid to speak out his mind, whatever trash it had. But having someone like him with you , as it turned out later , is too much fun, offcourse at his expense.

"Isnt it such a bliss being a bird?", I once asked Guru. " You can just float about in the air and worry about precious little. Oh! to be a bird, man. ". Pat came guru's reply, " how do you know birds dont take tension?". I was not a bit surprised, being with this gem for 4 years.Thats the kind of "speaking up your mind" i am talkin about. Hes not afraid to or ashamed to tell things that people with the most average cranial capacity would find ridiculous.And then he'll let out a small smile or a slight laugh realising what he has just done.Truly likeable!

Getting printouts in time for submissions have always proved to be guru's devil.Once in the first year the prof was asking students how many printouts they have completed.One said 5, the other 10. Guru,never the one to be left out, put his hands up and waved it frantically to catch the profs attention.He announced his status to the class with such pride that made us hide under the desks."Sir, Zero." We could see how the sir was at a loss for emotions and then finally said in hindi, "leke jao re isko."

Although not very tech-savvy, physics and science has always been guru's forte.Hes always left us logically stunned with questions and trivia ranging from the need for headlamps in trains to female anatomy.Appreciate a woman in front of guru and hes sure to drop in a comparison thats so pukable , you want to escape from the "goo" coverage area for atleast half an hour.

This happened a few months back.Me and Goo were travelling from Kurla to Dombivli in the train.The video coach (read ladies first class) was in front of us. So it had to be entertainment guaranteed.Almost everyone were stealing glances at the video coach while some others had their heart, mind and eyes on the wonderful beings of the coach as if it was their responsiblity to "look after" them.How blessed the ladies would have been feeling, i can only imagine.And then there were some others like our goo who seemed more interested in observing how the train changes tracks ( this after travelling in trains for almost 5-6 years).I was the "stealing glances" type for that day.But this female who got in at Ghatkopar required more than glances , in fact she was begging to be glanced at.She was endowed! So after a few peekaboos i tried telling guru how beautifully endowed she was.Our convo went like this.
"Guru , look at that female in the pink top."
(Goo looks obviously disturbed from his observations) " Where ? "
"Arre, there there" (i try to show him with my eyes pointing at her only to realise that guru was not even looking at me)
"That pink saree walli? "
"Pink saree?! " (Now i try to search for a pink saree hoping that guru had found another gem)
"yeah, that pink saree waali standing near the door. "
( I search the door and finally find an aunty most prolly in her 50s in a maroon saree. ) " Thats pink? "
"offcourse it is"
"fuck you. Abbe look at the chick standing at the entrance."
"ohh yeaah!" (gets an instant orgasmic reaction on his face)
"Isnt she endowed? "
"Like...how?"
(i couldnt help the disgust to show up on my face) " Look at her boobs yaar."
"Boobs? How are you able to see her boobs? Shes standing facing us."
"Yeah! I thought ladies have boobs in the front and not at the back."
"Isnt that true?"
(My eyes almost popped out)"Whats your definition of boobs?"
"Offcourse that thing on our backs"
"dOOd! those are bums...not boobs! Boobs are things on their fronts"
By the time i had explained him the meanings of the most basic terms, we had reached thane and i had lost some precious "steal-glance" moments.
"So, how do you find her stuff? "
"They are just fine.I have seen better."
"Where? Must be in porn."
"No.Look at the lady standing next to her."
Whoaaa! How could i miss her! She was draped in a saree but hadnt escaped gurus radar.
"Nice find!!!"
"I know" and goes back to his observations of how train changes tracks.

Challenging guru can be risky.He'l find the loophole in the challenge the moment it is laid and will merrily accept it,making us wonder if the task was really worth the challenge.But this time , we had no apprehensions about our challenge we had for guru.He had been checking out this chick in the class for quite some time.So one day we challenged him to go and talk to her.He thought for a few nanoseconds and said, "sure". He waited for the right moment.And that moment came when the class was left.He puposefully walked behind her and when they neared the steps, went close to her ears and said, "excuse me" and walked past her. He had talked to her.And she did move aside so he had actively talked to her.He had won the challenge, and we stood their laughing our guts out.

This has been my longest posts, but just a very brief idea of one of the most likeable guys i have ever come across.Intelligent, yet disgusting.Smart yet dumb.Almost always sweet and helpful,a dog at other times.Quite a mix! Quite an individual.