Our Ouija Board game.

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

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.

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?

What General Motors Gave Me.

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.

What Me Zero

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.

Trips

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.

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

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.

Oh, the name!

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

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

Executive: Sir, who is the Author?

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

Me: Andrei Tarkovsky?

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

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

Executive: As in Delhi?

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

Executive: Ok?

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

Executive: Sir?

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

Executive: Sir, and the first name?

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

Executive: Please hold sir ( and poof! )

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

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

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

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

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

Executive: Last name of the Author, Sir?

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

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

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

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

With raised expectations and a smile I told the name.

Executive: We do not have that book by Hempel.

Me: Oh, so which one do you have?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Them Tags

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

I shall start.

1) Books that changed your life :

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4) Books that made you laugh

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

5) Books that made you cry

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

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

6) A book you wish had been written

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

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

7) Books you wish had never been written

No idea !

8) Books you are currently reading :

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

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

Mine are :

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

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

Cricket !

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

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