Thursday, December 29, 2005

Leave of absence.

I am leaving to college tonight. Back to the grind and the pain of academics and other things. I don't want to but I don't have a choice. And someday I have to start earning.


I really need to get my life back on track. My acads are fucked and there is little hope. I am taking a leave of absence from blogging for a couple of months. To study and to bring balance to the force. Yeah...right...the force.

Here's wishing all of you a very Happy New Year


And, those of you who pray to God, put in a word for me, will ya?

Monday, December 26, 2005

I started with...

I happened to be simply thinking about posts that I have written over the past two years or so. Sometimes it is the line that I started out with that I remember and sometimes it is what went into the post that I remember. But, here is a bunch of opening lines that I remember.


The transition from a journal on paper to this electronic version has been rather...well...ahem..errr...er...nothing great.(That’s how my first post began.)


After a long blank in my life, here is a blog to fill in the electronic void.


I cannot see my watch without taking my left hand off. But, I know it’s six-thirty in the evening. Simply because the traffic refuses to move. There are a hundred horns honking away in a thunderous cacophony. The seconds counting down ever so slowly on the traffic-signal timer. The smell of burnt petrol mixing with the scent rising of the mud after the rain. My hands drumming on the steering column to the beat of Maiden’s ‘Wasted Years’; my whistling making up very poorly for the lead and rhythm guitars. (This one is a bit of a rip-off from the opening lines of ‘Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance’ by Robert Pirsig)

I feel like a cigarette.

The moon shone brightly overhead. The stars glittered like diamonds thrown carelessly on a gigantic black velvet cloth. Some of them lay in patters that ancient astronomers christened with names steeped in myth and fantasy; dedicated to heroes and gods in tales that had been handed down from generation to generation. Orion stood proud and alert, waiting for his next quarry. Maybe that was me.


I have always had this dream of writing a killer of a piece – hard-hitting opening line, heart-wrenching meaningful content and a very thoughtful end to it all. The point that I realize now is that there are two kinds of dreams – ones that turn into realities and ones that don’t. This is the latter kind. After reading countless blogs, stories, articles and editorials, I still can’t find inspiration. And, well, even if I do find the inspiration, I don’t have the talent to do it justice in words. That, of course, is a big if – if I find the inspiration.

This one simply had to be here. Though, the post never saw the light of the day, for reasons that will become obvious.

Back in the days when condoms leaked like a sieve and kids were like Ford cars and mothers were like production lines…

And I swear I couldn’t continue. I simply broke up into pieces and fell off my chair.


This is a whole blog. And this one is my favorite. Not many have read it, but here it is.

This was one of the days when the weather suddenly gets a little colder in the morning, making you get up out of that cozy little cavity in the mattress where you lazy warm all night. Then you decide that the fan is going a little too fast, or maybe that drafty window needs to be shut. The decision to figure out which would be better, or rather which would be easier, takes a quarter hour. Five more to do the job and you have five minutes till the alarm goes off. No point in sleeping, you decide, and trudge down the hallway in a daze, off to the bathrooms to brush. The sight of twelve others, all with the same bleary-eyed sleepy look mechanically brushing - left to right and left again, greets you. The toothpaste foams at the mouth, dribbles down the chin and onto the t-shirt which last saw the inside of a washing machine a long, long time ago. You walk up, wedge yourself into position with the others and brush away. Twenty dead minutes later, when your mouth and hand beg for mercy, you spit out the paste, gargle your mouth and rinse the toothbrush.

Back in the room, your roomy has already bathed, dressed and run around the wing three times for exercise. You curse your existence, the weather, the leaking tap and every other creation - artificial, natural or divine. Your roomy then skips off to have breakfast looking very pleased, indeed, with life. You don’t have a class for another hour and the thought of sleeping those precious sixty-minutes brings forth another barrage of curses. The sticky feeling gets a little stickier. Time to take a bath; the last one was a couple of days back. The bucket receives it usual load of underwear and towel and swings way in your hand on the long trip back. Two buckets of cold water, lots of soap and eight minutes has a sparkling new you in a towel around the waist ready to kill all those people who spoiled the morning. Dressed in the same old baggy jeans, you stand at the bookrack figuring out which books actually need to be taken, and your eyes fall on the little joint you rolled last night. Why not? It’s just a little one. A little high…that’s all. A couple of hundred meters, that’s all.

The match lights and your hands cup the flame. The joint lights nicely. The filter holds well, surprisingly. Two puffs. Things seem lighter. A little quicker than usual, quicker than yesterday, at any rate. You smoked one yesterday night, too. And the one on the night before that. It looks like it’s going out of control, but you tell yourself, “It’s alright! Sixteen sites and a couple of books said that weed wasn’t addictive. I can stop. Anytime!” The smoke billows away in the wind. Slowly the joint burns out; you chuck it away. It joins the other butts on the roof – cigarettes, joints and even a few beedis.

The stairs seem to flow below your feet as you slowly climb up the stairs to your class. Three hours of practicals - mindless commands and shells. The commands flow out like gibberish, questions that make no sense. You don’t bother; it doesn’t matter. It never did really, anyway. Your thoughts fly away to sweeter places. Time flies and everyone is leaving. You stumble out of your chair and walk slowly down the aisle, the flickering screens still shutting down. There is an assignment that needs to be submitted in a couple of hours. The first afternoon hour gets the sack.

The assignment gets copied in a trice. Too late for this hour and too early for the next. Wasn’t there a little more stuff left over from the morning’s manufacture? And you know what…there is even some tobacco. Crush. Roll. Twist. Light. Puff. The clouds all around you now seem softer than they did last time. You leave to class. The next teacher is yet to come. You find a place back there in the corner against the wall. The teacher walks in and as soon as the class starts you spit out all that you just learnt. The teacher ignores you for the rest of the class. The bell rings and you go to meet some teacher to talk about shifting your test to a different day. You are going to a college fest over the weekend. You promised yourself you wouldn’t screw it up this time, but you know you will. Some one hands you a form for some summer training and your friend says, “What the hell! Let’s just give it a shot. We don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell, but hell…one shot.” You type out your resume. It looks too bare; no stories of glories and laurels. Just plain average Joe. You give it anyway.

You go to the little shack and smoke a couple of cigarettes. It’s been a crazy day. Things planned beforehand never seem to work out. Impulsive decisions seemed to work just fine. Your room is filled with people either, cracking silly jokes, screwing with you computer or draped artlessly on your bed. Slowly the crowd trickles out. Playtime. The room empties. You look around for something to do. Your eyes fall out on the little white butt sticking out from under a pile of papers. Whoooooha… it’s a long forgotten joint. Nice and fat. Tight. Aaaaaaand…we have lift off.
The coders are back; mindless jumble of code that draws squiggly lines on the screen in jarring obscene colors. You shut your mind to their gleeful cries and yells, turn up the music and go back to that great gig in the sky. It begins to come down and the music slowly fades away. Your stomach feels empty and growls. It threatens to quit on you. A little bit of food is all that you can manage; the growling subsides to gentle purr.

You find company for another couple of hours of flying. This time it is a bong. You have never tried it before; today isn’t a bad day to start, is it? Two joints make things seem mellow and life doesn’t seem too bad to live. You go meet a couple of friends and the need to leave the ground comes back. People back in the block have gotten together in a room and are merrily making weird jokes that make no sense to you; you are way higher that you think. You walk away. You are the loner. Dark corner, paper and weed. The joint is ready. Being blown while rolling doesn’t matter anymore. You fingers know what to do. The match flares in the darkness.

You float back. You look at yourself in the mirror, moments before you crash out. It is a dark, haggard face with disheveled hair and week old stubble. Sunken bloodshot eyes stares back. You stare back. The lips move. A dry stammer.

“Happy Valentine’s Day!”


P.S. : This is entirely a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to people, dead or alive, is purely co-incidental. All places and incidents are fictions and are simply figments of the author’s imagination.

Saturday, December 24, 2005

Of chappals and of fakes...

If there were ever a level of sophistication that had no justification then this has to be it. I mean this was the pits of sophistication. But, before I get down to it, here’s a little background on the whole story that by itself is really amusing.

For a kid like me, brought up in Calcutta and Bombay(yes…back then they were still called that) in a solid middle class working family, the United States of America was always something that was spoken about with a certain glassed over look. The very mention of it would fill my head with pictures of manicured lawns and fancy cars and what not that drive the imagination of a little 8-year old kid wild. Add to that the friends who had fathers and uncles who came back from the USA with lots of chocolates and crayons and stuff that they brought to school to show off, you’ll get the idea.

At that stage of life my dad’s brother went to the Gulf – Dubai to be precise and he flew through Bombay on his way back and left behind a huge bag full of chocolates. I still remember the names – there was the usual Snickers and Mars, and there was this coconut filled bar called Bounty and tons of others with names written in an undecipherable script which I learnt later was called Arabic and wasn’t really an alien language. Oh…and I got my first set of Crayola crayons. For a week, I was the cool cat in class. Everyone wanted to be my best friend. Then some idiot’s dad went and got him a 56-shade Crayola box. So, I was relegated to second best friend. But, that guy was a dud anyway and got taken for a ride. Someone stole his crayons.

And then there were various other relatives from extended branches that went and settled overseas and became citizens. One such example was my dad’s mother’s elder sister’s daughter. For the sake of simplicity let’s just call her Aunt, her husband Uncle and kids Son and Daughter. Now, Aunt, according to the latest intelligence reports has been in the USA for the past 33 years, which is ever since she got married. Uncle used to work on the National Scientific Advisory Council or some thing to that effect. Basically, he gets greeting cards from the White House for Christmas, New Year, Thanksgiving and other random occasions. Son and Daughter are both American citizens and speak American and Aunt throws statements like, “Would you like to complete that train of thought before I interrupt you?” Good going Aunt, what do you think that statement just did, eh?

They come to India once in three years and we are expected to talk to them as if we met them ten minutes ago on the way to the loo. Or whatever. And since, they have oh so busy schedules compared to us unlucky folks stuck in India, they will organize a pseudocool get-togther in a pseudoplace and everyone is expected to turn up.

Now, comes the killer. This time around it was at the KGA club on Airport road. The catch is that you are not allowed to wear slippers and that kind of footwear. It has to be something that has a strap at the back. Neither are you allowed to wear round neck t-shirts that are missing collars. Why? No one knows. Club policy and all that. Despite all this, the Aunt’s brother is a member there and pays some obscene amount of cash on a yearly basis to be able to chase little white balls around nine holes and then sit and sip 60-buck Royal stag at 300-bucks a shot in a club house with equally dumb people.

Needless to say, I elected to stay at home to go pick up my sister, look after my grandmom and write this post. I also have it from eye-witnesses that a ceratin aunt of mine who resembles a rikishi in build managed to overpower the bouncers and walk in with a pair of Paragon hawaii chappals.
Adios and here’s wishing all of you a Merry Christmas and a Zappy New year!

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Hmm...

I am pretty sure at some point in life everyone has been confronted with a situation that seem…well…strange. I really can’t find a word that succinctly describes what I want to describe so I will just call it strange. The states of things that I refer to are thus.

a.) You know you have been taken for a ride, it’s unfair and you landed the bad end of the deal.
b.) There are ways to get back but you simply won’t do it because that is compromising your own principles and you will on no account resort to that.
c.) Everyone around is pretty happy, things are hunky-dory for them and you know that they played dirty.
d.) You are twenty and you are in college at a point of time where you know you can make a change but you know the world will kill you if you try to.

So, you know you are going to get fucked. So, might as well, lie down and enjoy it.

God…I hate this relative grading. Thank you, dear lecturers of ‘Ye Olde NITK’ for screwing my life. Gracias!


P.S: Not only, grading. Everything.

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Tagged!

I got tagged. Here goes the most difficult post I have had to write – twenty things about myself.

1. I guess therefore I maybe. I am a very confused soul. I have no idea what I want to be. It currently is a fair fight between engineer, drummer, chef, musician ad wildlife photographer. In the past it has been ninja, barber, cobbler and an assassin. No kidding…I swear.
2. I am very gullible. I can trust people very easily. If someone is nice enough to me and lends me a kindly ear, I will spill my guts and tell them the color of my underwear.
3. I wish I could fly.
4. I am crazy about food. And crazier about while reading my favorite book while eating. I will eat almost anything that falls under the category of junk food. I love snacking on potato chips.
5. I am an absolute weirdo. I am big fan of hard rock and metal and Carnatic classical. I can even recognize a handful of ragams. I can swear colorfully in four languages and I know a smattering of the ‘Vedas’.
6. I wanted to grow my hair long. I still do, but a couple of days back I was forced into cutting it short. My hairdresser(yeah…I go to a hairdresser, not a barber) thought that it was a pity to cut such long hair, so he gave me this really nifty look.
7. I think I can fall in love very easily. And that makes me think that my definition of love is not exactly what the majority of humankind calls love. Never mind, I realized that writing my own operating system a la Linus Torvalds style is easier than figuring out women and falling in love with one. It will happen when it will, you cannot stop or predict the inevitable, I guess. Whatever, inevitable might be.
8. I obsess about stuff. From people, to tunes, to problems and god knows what. Something that I cannot place or find an answer to haunts me for a long time and it eventually drives me crazy. If someone hurt me, it takes me really long to heal.
9. I have a very very short fuse. My temper scares me and I can fly into a wild rage at a moments notice. I end up shouting at people for no fault of theirs and later I have to go down on my knees and say sorry. I don’t really mind saying sorry.
10. I hate people who lie. And that too without tact. If I know someone is lying I will go to great lengths to prove that they are and then blow up at them.
11. I believe that everyone is beautiful and great in their own right. Everyone is special and everyone deserves a fair chance and a second chance.
12. I don’t really believe much in God. It’s not like I hate God, it’s just that if he is there then I am glad that he is there. If he isn’t there then I am sorry, that a lot of people simply wasted their lives trying to find him.
13. I am a fairly contended guy. I think I have pretty much of what I need. A loving family, lots of friends, a bunch of people to bitch about, a little extra cash to blow. Right now all I want is a doctorate and nice satisfying teaching job in about five years from now. And someone to watch the sun set into the ocean.
14. I simply love to read. Comics and books are something that I hoard whenever I find I have the money to buy them. I don’t read vague intellectual stuff. I am very happy reading stuff that people have heard about.
15. I am a die-hard quizzer. Or, at least, I used to be. Some where along the line all that enthusiasm evaporated. I am desperately trying to find some way of getting it all back. Help…!!! I wish I were funny enough, too.
16. I am a loner. I like people, but most of the times I am very comfortable on my own, partly because I am scared that I might rub people the wrong way. I have little tact and subtlety. I sit on the beach for hours together at a stretch. I have spent a whole night on the beach all alone. I am creature of the night.
17. The people I love and care about I cannot live without. I constantly need to talk to them just to know that they are there. And I miss folks terribly…very terribly.
18. I am self-styled experimental cook. I get high by throwing random things into a pan on the fire and then mix it all up to get something that tastes brilliant. My success rate is slightly more than fifty percent. If not an engineer then definitely a restaurateur. Some thing exclusive and small and homely, maybe.
19. I like to write. I hope someday, something I write will become famous and some one will walk up to me on the street and say, “Aren’t you the guy who wrote…” But the writing is getting harder and harder by the day. I am going to make a resolution this New Year to write more often. And I have a very bad track record of keeping up resolution.
20. I dream. Day dream, at night, in buses, in class, while studying…almost everywhere. They range from bizarre to normal to dark and foreboding. Most of them are what will never happen, but then what’s a dream if you don’t dream it!

And…I guess that’s it. Thanks, silverine.

Wtmewry and M are hereby declared tagged. Go write twenty things about yourselves. Else face my wrath!