Cricket !

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

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

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

A Chat

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

Phlpn : So, where are you?

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

Me: In the loo, taking a shit.

Phlpn: Huh?, What do u mean?

Me: Loo. Shit.

Phlpn: What?

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

Me: Baby, Loo = Toilet.

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

Me: Uhh, yeah.

Curious Phlpn: And your media?

Me: My what?

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

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

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

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

Excited Phlpn: You moan?

Me: No, I groan. And cry.

Confused Phlpn: Uh, why cry?

Me: Fun.

She didn't reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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

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...

...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.