It's a jungle out there...

FYI (For your information) ...

2007-08-24T09:57:00.001-07:00

This is my new blog.

http://technicallybored.blogspot.com

And, I closed my first PR today on Bugzilla. Whooohooo!

Bits to bits, bytes to bytes and a little dollop of chocolate sauce...

2007-07-22T01:58:00.000-07:00

Yeah...the chocolate sauce makes no sense.

I am kinda bored of this blog. I am starting a spanking new one.

Will put link here soon.

2007-07-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

I Bow to thee! I really and truly do!
Just check this out!

Scary...

2007-07-02T08:24:00.000-07:00

There is this program on Discovery called 'Colors of India' that is going on. Nilekani and Premji are spouting shit about globalization and blah, the offices look swanky and hell...I am going to be one of those don't-care-a-damn-techie in 7 days from now.

And then there are thousands of folks in our very namma Bangalore who live in absolute squalid conditions.

Fuck...we are a fucking heartless bunch!

God save this country!

Read this!

2007-04-29T08:16:00.001-07:00

I know the readership of this blog is pretty low and non-existent, but yet, I will make a small request to all you people who read this blog. So here goes...

I am attempting to compile a little book of sorts of stuff that people have written. Anything that you have written or read somewhere that other folks would like to read, please send them to me. Everything is good and you are free to be politically incorrect and rude. Just drop me a mail a bluebarnacle[at]gmail[dot]com. If you are from NITK, then all the better - write something about your memories here - no holds barred. 

Take care and play safe.

Subbu.

Namastey London aka Why Katrina Kaif is so hot!

2007-04-07T06:48:00.001-07:00

Ascribe it to the impending double disaster of a very expensive exam and the deadline for presenting my major(ly) (screwed) project or my capricious nature, but I ended up watching a fairly cuppax print of the movie that find a mention in the title. (In case you thought "Why Katrina Kaif is so hot!" is the name of a movie, then I suggest you go get your head examined. That, dear reader, is not something as inane as a title - it is a fact!)

So, I got my bum down to watching the movie. It did take a lot of effort. The last time around  when I was conned into watching a movie, with a fancy title that read 'Just Married'. Now, given the highly lecherous mind that I have, I figured that it would have a lot of...um..well...ahem...you know - steamy stuff that made the camera lens mist over. Sadly, it turned out to be a Bollywood flick that starred Fardeen Khan (who is cho chweeet according to several women acquaintances of mine and who is absolutely revolting according to me) and Esha Deol (who effectively has the face of an IFBB Pro - Ms. Olympia with a body that is bloody bloody hot). The two hours that I spent in the theater just to vasool the sixty bucks the ticket cost was among the worst two hours of my life - second only to the two hours that I spent watching Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna. If you are wondering, I slept through the remainder of the movie.

Coming back after that little digression, Namastey London is not really a bad movie. It is plain trash. It is a storyline that we have all seen so many times in setting other than London that it is almost a chance to sit and play a guessing game - predicting what will happen next (it should be, at any rate, more profitable than any guessing related to the ICC World Cup). If you came around looking for something emotionally evocative or addressed a social issue, then you came to the wrong movie. Please walk down to the next screen where they are screening 'Pursuit of Happyness'. Awesome movie, btw!

NRI girl born-and-brought-up in London has trouble adjusting to the fact that her parents are not comfortable with her attitude and multitude of boy-friends. Come to India on a trip and enter home-grown Funjanbi (no kidding! really...) who get hitched to her. She comes back to London and claims that they aren't married under British laws. Proceeds to marry a Brit with the most fantastic name of Charlie Brown. Of course, our Funjabi can't speak the Queen's language and proceeds to save India's glory with a very awesome speech peppered with facts and figures from the latest edition of the Manorama Yearbook. Oh, he also plays rugby and strips Brit arse in the process.

He then walks her down to the altar for the vows with Charlie boy, smiles and turns around and walks away. But, wait...that is not the happy ending that we all were waiting for. Predictably, he turns around yet again, walks back to the altar and in chaste...wait for it...English(!!!!) congratulates the couple and all that. She fumbles her vows and runs after him. Cut back to Funjab (now this, I made up) where they are happily touring the countryside on his khatara motorcycle. Finish.

Painful, but Katrina makes it all bearable. She speaks English with a very very sexy Brit accent and Hindi with an accent that is forgivable because she is so so hot. Akshay Kumar is out of his element and there is just this brief shot that is set way in the future when they are all old where for a moment he exudes the power and charm reminiscent of Nicholas Cage. Other than that Rishi Kapoor is as fat as he can get and owns a Spykar jeans outlet. If you haven't been to London you will get a decent tour of the city minus the names. Just the sights.

All in all avoidable, unless of course it is three in the wee hours of the morning and you are cursing your fate that there are no pretty women in your college.

Today we die in hell!

2007-04-04T23:17:00.000-07:00

It’s a frickin’ battle when you walk in. Accept it or get the fuck out. That is the rule. And that is the only rule. Read Rule 1 again.

Yeah…your balls are against the walls, eh? It pains, eh? What…say that again? Your muscles are on fire? Your head is pounding, eh?

FUCK YOU!!!! PUSH IT…BITCH! PUSH!

One more rep!
Fuck, I love pumping iron!

Wednesday's coming.

2007-02-11T08:31:00.000-08:00

Yes...before you tell me, that was an attempted play on the famous song by Lynrd Skynrd. I can also see you groaning you rear off. But, please do bear with me. Or, beer.

Ok, dude...! I'll stop!

Yet another Valentine's day looms around the corner as Hutch (Vodafone owns it now) tries to get to me to take advantage of their Value-added services(VAS) and send either roses or play a song for my loved one. Tell him/her, (Hutch does not believe in discriminating based on sexual preference) how much I love them.

Thing is that I do not have sufficient balance to take advantage of all these nifty offers. Who wouldn't want to send flowers sitting in boring math class to one's girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse/whatever???

Sigh...I am also single. It is a record! 21 consecutive Valentine's day.

/*takes a bow*/

Of terrorism, credits and orange snow.

2007-02-05T05:27:00.000-08:00

I was leafing through the newspaper today afternoon in the company of Tarun and Kiran. There was something about suspected Jaish-e-Mohammed militants being apprehended on the first pages. The jokers that we are, we went on a trip about why these buggers kept getting caught so often.

Now any sane college student who has a fair knowledge of current affairs and is not given to alcohol excesses would have said, "Why...our intelligence agencies are getting better. India shining...India poised!" Don't get me wrong, I love my country and all that, but I am given to being politically incorrect, irreverent and normally insane.

I figured that probably these militant buggers are getting bad at their stuff. They must be short on bakras up there to do terrorism, so the honchos out there in those camps decided to use solid marketing to sell the idea.

I am pretty sure they know what 'Friends' is and they probably fantasize about being on 'Big Brother'. It's like call-me-colored-all-you-want-but-watch-out-for-the-AK47. Which means that capitalism is out there making people spend more and want more. Think about it -

"Bored of the same old routine cruise or ski trip? Want some real action? It's dirt cheap...Jaish-School of Terrorism offers short term three-month courses in sabotage and fanaticism. Hurry limited seats only! Full meals and welcome chai included. We also have a water hole and desert for real-simulation."

Which hot-blooded beer-bellied forty-plus man wouldn't be interested in this? College kids would go crazy about it. Women would be salivating over the thought of getting rid of the guys and hitting all the party-spots in town without the fear of being leeched at.

Now, three months is only so much time. You can learn to run without tripping over, learn to cook up a bomb that fits you, riddle people with bullets and how to hold your piss during crucial missions. Obviously, this is much too less time to learn how to not make yourself conspicuous. It sure must take a lot of effort to keep from wearing the class t-shirt that they give away for free. Or hide the AK-47. I mean, not everyone gets to tot an AK-47 around - at least not if you are not a militant, in the armed forces or Sanjay Dutt. And plus, the referral program is hard to resist - ten-free days during the next holiday. You need to talk to people to get them interested.

The odd-intelligence guy who is traveling by train or bus sitting next to one of these dudes would have heard something and the rest is...well...you know...

In another interesting piece of news, there was apparently orange snowfall in some town in Russia. I am sure the place must look pretty gay by now. Reports said that this was due to the iron content in the snow being four times higher than normal. Authorities have advised people not to touch it or feed it to their animals...!!!! WTF???!!!

And as people are getting out their brightest pink, greens and reds to blend in with the current color scheme, the government is wondering whether it was the Nuclear Power Plant or the Chemical and Metallurgical Plant.

You guys stay safe and stop polluting the air. Who knows when we will land up with green clouds and pink soil?

Hmm...

2007-02-03T09:45:00.000-08:00

I am missing out on amazing opportunity to immortalize my name in
a special edition.

I think I am going to....

Oh...Sod off motherfuckers!!! Kiss my ass!!

About me

2007-01-19T20:27:00.001-08:00

The feeling of laziness that creeps in once I hit college is insanely crazy. Forgive the use of unsuitable adjectives and irrelevant nouns, but as someone said an average person like me have trivial pursuits in life – a monotonous existence that is thrown off track each time the bell rings. It’s pretty much like waking up…actually it IS like waking up considering most of my time is spent sleeping – in class and outside. The rare instants that I am awake are fruitlessly spent in proving my presence in class to the instructor in an attempt to satisfy the academic requirements of an institution that run on a clock that is ten years late.

The most interesting moment of my day is when I brush my teeth. The sight of foaming toothpaste and the noxious purple toothbrush that I own never fails to titillate my senses. There is very little that can shake me out of my constancy. Murders, engagements and proposals involving high profile actors, new movies, cheap movie spoofs with generous helpings of lewd obscenities or, for that matter, unfair trials and punishments. The occasional animator comes along once in a while and says something that makes me seethe and fume at the mouth and then ten seconds later I lapse back in pointless thought about ants and continue to twiddle my thumbs.
The failure and absence of all things romantic is a glaring mark on my otherwise gleaming record that boasts of achievements like eight shots of tequila followed by six of rum and the subsequent passing out. It is a truth that people bring up from time to time, much to my discomfort. Not because it hurts my feelings or anything, it is just that my friends have this nasty habit of speaking it out loud as opposed to just thinking about how they would speak it out loud. Their total disregard for making an effort at reducing noise pollution by staying silent is highly offensive. The effort to listen is tremendous and usually leaves me so fatigued that I have to sleep for the rest of the day.

After, ten long hours of disturbed sleep through the day, it is, indeed, a Herculean task to change and climb into bed for the night. The very act of having to fluff my pillows (they are stuffed with down…in case you were wondering) puts me to sleep due to the sheer exhaustion that it causes.

All this, at this tender age of twenty one is not what many men or women have been able to do. Give me credit. I really thi…..~snore~.

Chain mail. (no...not the ones the knights wore)

2006-12-03T02:36:00.000-08:00

This is a chain mail that originated in Mogadishu, Somalia. It was started by a mercenary who later had luck when food supplies dropped by The USAF landed in his back yard.

This was received by a carpenter in Tijuana and he was blessed with the luck of making the frames for all the local billboards in the town of Nowhere,Wyoming.

A Janitor in Manitoba ignored this mail and then next day all the toilets at the local high school he worked in turned green. He was asked to do the chicken dance by the principal as punishment.

Send this mail to 353 people in the next ten seconds, then run naked around your room twice and then gargle a litre of salt water and you will have good luck with a sore throat.

If you fail to send this then you will suddenly feel the urge to pee and it will so happen that you will wet yourself.

Please do not ignore.

Sounds familiar...? If it does then you probably are on Orkut and have the habit of checking your messages.

It might seem ridiculous, this message, but hey...it could have happened. There are a lot of things in this world that are still unexplained. Primary reason why we have the concept of 'GOD'.

P.S: I started that chain mail. I wrote it at four a.m and mailed it to everyone about a couple of weeks ago. And what goes around comes around. It also goes to show that the average human IQ is slightly below that of a broken tea-cup.

2006-11-15T09:11:00.000-08:00

I have totally given up on titles for my posts. It's easier to use performancing and there are like ten people who read my blog.

The anatomy of an Orkut testimonial

X is an absolute pig and loves to torture echidnas. He forced me to write this at gunpoint so here goes...
X is a really sweet guy, whom I have known for n years. He was helpful and helped me clean up my potty in kindergarten, my vomit in class 3, first year of engineering and at my graduation. He is kind-hearted and loves animals. Not in the wrong sense...he he he.
He is very talented and can play the didgeridoo , the kanjeera and the fool. He..he..he..just kidding. He simply plays the fool.He...he...he kidding again. He got the first rank in class one and has ever since inspired me to improve my copying skills. He was also the best bench monitor and homework leader I ever had.
X, you have been a source of inspiration, constipation and ejaculation ( check all that apply). Hope we remain friends...forever.

Man...X...you should have just pulled the trigger and done yourself and all of us a big favor.

2006-11-12T02:45:00.000-08:00

Bloody Weird

Bloody hell...We are watching 'How I Met Your Mother' and <a href="tarunr.blogspot.com">Ra</a> and this is what happened...

Ra: What would you call yourself if you were a pornstar? (How the fuck can you ask a question like that?)

Me: Jeffery Harder...

Ra: I want to call myself Long Dong Silver...*grin*

Yes...you can laugh now!

2006-11-11T01:56:00.000-08:00

Yet another post aka YAP

Yeah...so I got this nitfty pugin for Firefox called Performancing. Google it....It works all right except that I can't seem to be able to get the title to the post right!

Frickin' weird life I lead. I sat up all of yesterday night trying to get stuff for a project working. And hell!...it wasn't mine. It was for a junior of mine. I cannot remember the last time I put some much rod for a project. And fuck...it's not even a gal. It's a guy. Something like me - but much yo-er and born in the US of A.

Umm...

2006-10-24T09:35:00.000-07:00

Life ain't forever. Face it.

Hope you are having a good time up there. Love you and miss you!

Return to Innocence???

2006-10-16T12:32:00.000-07:00

It’s been a pretty lousy two and a half months in college. The academics aren’t bad, actually, they are good. Apart from that, I have had constant reminders that people are not to be trusted. That the winner always writes the history. That winning is everything. That how you win is inconsequential. That nothing else matters.

That apart, there are these people who remind you sometime that there is still some innocence left in the world after all. This double-X chromosome friend of mine, whom I bumped into the other day, is a prime example of that - most of the times, at least. I might be wrong about the whole thing, but I don’t have too many friends of the opposite sex which I suspect is the result of a cosmic screw up with my DNA. Maybe one day, far in the future, scientist will learn why women hate some men and avoid them when the map my chromosomes.

So, the lady was shooting hoops when I happened to be in the near vicinity. Probably out of social protocol that demands that you greet an acquaintance made her say, “Hi…” She then went of to describe the sand dunes back at home. “It’s like the sea…waves you know…”, she said and then proceed to mime waves with her hands. She whistled and her hand was the Boeing-747 on which she flew back home, when I asked her when she was flying back.

Hell…why can’t I once again be that little boy whose biggest worry in life was whether he would get the window seat on the school bus the next day. He worried all night and then when he woke up the next day with a master plan, he realized that it was a Sunday. And, then he went out and played in the mud and tossed his precious tennis ball around.

Update...

2006-09-26T23:59:00.000-07:00

I finally got a connection to the Internet and, of course, the World Wide Web from my room. I guess I will be posting a tad more frequently. Kasht ke like maafi chahatha hoon...

2006-09-20T21:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday figures in the top ten of the worst days of my life. I got two rejects from jobs that I really wanted. Then I asked this really sweet girl out for dinner and guess what...I GOT REJECTED.

I am currently waiting for my body to start rejecting my internal organs one by one.

Please do leave a white lilly on my grave.

PS: I have a job but I dunno if it will be interesting. And if you work on random number generators or know someone who does please let me know. I need some help. Drop me a mail at bluebarnacle[at]gmail.com

Yeeeeeeeeeeeha!

2006-07-15T22:09:00.000-07:00

1000. I love you all!

I make people uncomfotable...

2006-07-10T02:09:00.000-07:00

Sigh…! I make women uncomfortable, and something tells me that this is just half the story. And for once, I don’t want to hear the rest of it.

Apparently, women don’t like it when people can talk about sex without ahem-ing and err-ing. So, what is the big deal anyway, eh? Face it…someday you will realize that you want to have kids and I am pretty sure that you know storks don’t bring home little babies. And, if God had wanted to make sex a bad thing then he wouldn’t have made it so enjoyable.

But maybe I am wrong…sex is over rated.

I wish I could make people disappear.

So...

2006-07-07T05:32:00.000-07:00

This is an attempt at writing after a really really long time. The last few did not manage to even hit double - digits in terms of the number of lines or for that matter, manage to get off the mark in making sense.

After, trying to evade writing code for the project that I am doing I figured out that there was no way out. The only way I was going to be even a shred closer to coming up with something new, or even learn something was by getting my hands dirty. The funny thing is that it wasn’t all that bad when I got down to doing it – yes – it took me three failed attempts before I came up with a working program. There were a lot of things that I learned in course of the attempt – including things that I thought were pointless in college partially because they seemed hard to understand or were taught by useless teachers.

There is something that we all forget when we step into college. It’s probably the euphoria that is result of cracking an all-India examination, doing maybe passably well enough to get a seat in a college of national repute. Agreed that the teaching in colleges in India leaves much to be desired, but there is some little good in it surely. I am not trying to defend bad teaching, all I am saying is that maybe we should try to listen a little more in class – even if the teacher is a sadistic bitch, a BSc flunker or a wig-wearing sex-deprived fascist.

Somewhere in that mess that they dole out is a sliver of useful information that is useful. Ask me. KC talked all about how he asked his wife for her opinion while buying shirts but in the end still picked up the nasty yellow one with lime-green polka dots. Somewhere in the middle of all that he happened to mention what a trie was. Turns out that this thing is a very good way of storing lexically ordered stuff. My entire code hinges on the fact that searching in tries takes linear time when implemented with linked lists. Icing…a generous 5000 buck stipend for two whole months. And tax-free.

And, before all you bigshots doing bigshot internships say something – my guide said he would be more than happy to give me a reference.

Bah...!

2006-07-05T01:58:00.000-07:00

The Germans are rough lot. The Italians are the biggest fakers. At least, Totti's wife is a pornstar!

Yipee...

2006-07-01T11:33:00.000-07:00

Portugal won!!!What a team, what a game!!!

Damn...!

2006-06-30T10:59:00.000-07:00

Argentina, so f***ing deserved to win! Dammit...now Klinsman get to wave his ass around.

Damn!!!

I wish...

2006-06-04T02:08:00.000-07:00

I went to this concert yesterday night by a really famous dude. Carnatic classical. And every single time I listen to good music it happens to me. And it happened again to me yesterday.

Twenty years worth of repent…ok, maybe fifteen years comes out in one nasty shot that renders me incapable of thought and sensible speech. Somewhere, deep down inside, I guess I still nurse that grudge against my dad and fate that I had to move around the country so often, never staying long enough in one place. I always wanted to learn music – more specifically – learn to play an instrument. But, that has eluded me for so long that right now I wish I had the guts to give up everything that I am doing now and learn music. Maybe I’ll suck at it, but I am ready to accept that. I want to give it a shot.

Somehow, it’s been drilled into me that I should study and get a degree. A something to fall back upon – a Plan B. I see my friends who play the guitar, drums, violin, mridangam… and I feel jealous that I cannot play any instrument. However bad it may sound.

It isn’t that I did not try. I learnt vocal for a year when I was in class five and then when I reached the point where I sounded a little better than a toad with laryngitis, my dad moved to Allahabad, where the nearest teacher lived 25 kilometers away. In Bangalore, I learnt violin for a month – the teacher wasn’t interested in teaching and I had been brainwashed to believe that if I did not get into one of the IITs, it was the end of the world as I knew it.

After I joined engineering I learnt to play the mandolin for a month. I even brought one and I still strum some weird tune on it occasionally. I had to give it up because now I had been brainwashed to believe that if I did my engineering course well I could go abroad to study. And my teacher lived 365 kilometers away. So far so good, so what?

I am not doing all that badly in college but somehow the past three years have convinced me that I am not special. Not the kind who would make the front page of the newspaper someday for having invented or discovered something. I am never going to sit for diner with the king of Sweden or make jokes like “Now that you have seen the Raman effect on wine, you want to see the effect of wine on Raman…” No one is going to call me up and ask me to host a mega-quiz for 5000 school kids.

But, maybe if I had learnt to play something, I would have had the chance to go on stage…maybe just once, because I would have sucked anyways…and maybe one single person would have clapped when I finished.

I just wish…

Overheard...

2006-05-27T02:53:00.000-07:00

I was at the bus-stop yesterday night waiting for a bus to go back home. As is normal for me to do, I was beating away at imaginary drums and shredding imaginary riffs on a guitar. People around were giving me strange looks but they didn’t know the mystical therapeutic powers of ‘Overture 1928’ by Dream Theater from the album ‘Scenes from a Memory’.

So, there I was, totally lost in my world, on a huge stage surrounded by thousands of people and bathed in eerie strobe lights when it began raining. Then, this kinda-cute looking girl decides that getting wet in the rain isn’t a good idea and ran under the very shelter that was my stage. Damn!...but the nice guy that I am I sat quietly…Then she whips out her oh-so-fancy-and-nifty-with-neon-lights-toothbrush-and-makeup-kit mobile phone and begins jabbering into it.

Now, the things is that, I don’t listen in on other people’s conversations, especially ones in which I can hear only one side, but the lady’s concept of speaking in a low voice was missing something – namely, the low voice. She was drowning out the noise of the eight-o-clock rush hour traffic…

I kept still for sometime, hoping that seeing an enthusiastic drummer go “statue!” in the middle of an involved drum solo sent out a subtle message that screamed “SHUT UP ALREADY!!!”. No go…she went on and on. I whipped out a pad and a pen and started taking down notes, and this is how the conversation went…

“I thought that you people were angry with me so I stopped keeping in touch with you, but then now that I have called you and it’s all cleared; I will call you people up regularly…” (damn…how many more conversations do I have to endure?)

“This Jaffer(?) is crazy, ya. Everyday in the morning he keeps sending these romantic messages and good morning messages…”(People who have sense say "good morning" in the morning and "shut up" when you are loud…)

“I promised my friend that I would watch Da Vinci Code with her, but I want to read the book before I watch it…”(God, help you friend. Or alternatively, you could put duct tape on her mouth when you are watching the movie…)

“No…but I want to read the book first. I mean…I have to understand something about all this fundoo stuff before I watch the movie, no??? It’s become like studying for one exam…but I have finished only three chapters. You know, people tell me sometimes that books are dragging in the beginning but later they get so gripping that you can’t put the book down at all…I hope it like that for me[sic!]” (Mr.Brown, please please…grip her around the neck. And could you make it really tight…?)

“You wanted to meet in Forum, but that is so far from your office no?”(Yes, now could you get away real far from me…)

“Oh…it is all very expensive there??? So what do you do – just window shopping?”(No, they sweep the floors, clean toilets and look for lost puppies to scrounge up enough money to buy a piddly little panty that costs as much as half the GDP of a small country…duh!)

“So your boss is helping you out because he is leaving. So nice of him, ya. You like your work and all no?”(Oooo…how sweet. The poor chap is quitting because of your stupid calls maybe. Have a heart you loud-mouthed nincompoop…)

“Actually I am meeting this senior of mine from BITS Pilani, who has come for his holidays from the US for lunch.”(Don’t tell me you studied there….ah…well figures…no one told you to keep your voice down in the middle of the desert did they?)

“He keeps talking about all this things in Da Vinci Code…Mary Magdalene, Holy Grail, Priory of Sion and all that. I googled them all yesterday so that I don’t feel bored tomorrow. He is so fundoo, you know…”( Yes, I know. Thank you. He probably googled it too, but then both of you are from the middle of a desert)

And then, the phone went dead. I think the connection was broken and the network was too clogged to take the load of an entirely pointless call. For once, I actually prayed that the networks would remain clogged till the bus arrived. And they did. She kept looking at her phone and cursed it hoping it would turn into a frog or something. Nothing of that sort happened, probably because she googled her spells…

Back in black!

2006-05-20T15:06:00.000-07:00

I started writing this post and somehow my brain(or that lump in my skull that masquerades as a brain, but in reality is a hunk of the Titanic) wandered off. Brains(yes…I know it is a rusted, barnacled hunk of metal, but humor me) can very easily wander off when you are in a lab trying to work on some seemingly insurmountable problem. Mine wanders for no particular reason at all.

For the record, I am once again doing a project at the Department of Management Studies at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. The project is all confidential and hush-hush so all I can tell you is that it does not involve mayonnaise, engine-oil or live animals. In other words, no animals were harmed during this project. Save me. If that sounded impressive and you think I am a really cool guy, please drop me a mail at bluebarnacle@gmail.com and I shall be more that happy to dispel your illusion.

So, getting back to wandering brains, mine wandered off for a bit of grazing and I read some old e-mails that have accumulated over the past couple of years. It starts of with a punk who slowly becomes this smart-aleck, then a know-it-all-wisecrack and then finally this formal sounding serious guy who seems to have figured out the answer to life, the universe and everything else. It looks like me and the answer is not forty-two. It’s not entirely new, this exercise, - I keep doing this once in about 6 months and each time a little new pattern pops out, a tiny piece of the jigsaw fits in and I eat another sandwich.
I rarely delete mails that are from real people.

It’s been a long time since I have posted anything and yet for some reason the counter keeps ticking. Someone is checking my blog and I would dearly like to know a) if it is a real person, b)if I know them, c)why do you keep checking my blog and d)do you like it. If you do like it(or even if you don’t) then, please leave a comment or drop me a mail at bluebarnacle@gmail.com. That’s the same id twice in this post. Saves you the trouble of scrolling up. And, yes, if you think you might have a friend or a relative who might like reading it, direct them to my blog.

I happened to go to this quiz that was happening at this local college here in Bangalore. Most colleges here have a fairly normal male-female ratio that is almost equal. Unlike the case in my college where it is 13:1. To cut a long story short, I found myself in the company of two really cute and interesting women, thanks to an old friend. They were friends of his. The average guy from my college would immediately start plotting pick-up lines and ways to hit on them, but all I could think of was data mining and linear programming. I am not gay which, now, implies that I am a)stupid, b)blind, c)decent or d)Don’t know/Can’t say. You choose. Following this realization that I was probably the biggest reason for an abnormally high national average age for people having girlfriends/boyfriends and that I was probably screwing up some other more gifted guys chances I left the place, got home, ate slept, made pasta and sandwiches, spent the night at the lab and wrote this.

So, much for now. More in a couple of days.

Why do women...have it easy in life?

2006-03-18T10:21:00.000-08:00

Why do women have it easy in life? Oh, don’t get me wrong…I am not a women hater or anything, it’s just that I find it a little strange that somehow a woman gets it a little easier in life.

Yes…I can see all of you ladies smacking your lips and thinking, “Hey little fool, come right here. I have a thing or two to say to you about equality and childbirth, to just name a few…” Hang on…all I am going to say is from the perspective of a 20-year old male with no special abilities or claims to fame. I am that chap you see at the bus stop in faded jeans and t-shirt, with a baseball cap stuck on the head at an odd angle and the worn-out backpack slung over an arm.

I, have no intention to even trying to prove women are in any way inferior to men. They aren’t. I simply intend to say a few things the way I have seen it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Women, have this really super ability to make you feel like a little sorry worm that got cut into half because he was stuck in an apple. You will blow up at that woman you love and it won’t be without reason, but still when that anger goes down, you will still pick p that phone with butterflies in your stomach and call up to say sorry. Maybe, you will, on purpose, make a fool of yourself just to hear her laugh.

Women are asked out by men. As far as I know, not one of my friends has been asked out by a woman. And, neither have I. The fact that I study in an engineering college that is way out in the boondocks does not help. Dammit…I’d kill to have a girl walk up to me and say, “Hi…I’ve seen you around quite a bit. Interesting chap, you seem to be. What say coffee?” Gawd…that don’t look like it is going to happen in the next couple of…hmm...let’s see…centuries??? If any girl, who however remotely, has some plan like that is reading this, then please…please come by and pop the question. I promise I will go and get that cappuccino. The only condition being that you will have to tell your boy-friend not to beat me up.

There is something God gave the fairer sex a little more. I absolutely cannot say no to them. Or at least, that pleading or coy or no-what-do-you-think-you-are-going-to-say look dissolves every little bit or resistance that I may have had. It’s always “Awww…al right…never mind. Trust me, it is ok. No sweat!” I have faced the wrath of a demented homicidal serial-flunker teacher, because I couldn’t say no.

I accept that the sweetest things that God made were women. There are things that will come tumbling out easily in front of your girl or your mom that will not in front of anyone else, despite the obscene amounts of alcohol that’s taking place of the blood in you. Somehow, you ladies are more receptive to emotions than men. We are by default deterministic finite state automatons. Never mind if you don’t know what they are.

What started out as a rant, turned into this. But, just so that I can get rid of the feeling…have a care. We too have a heart. Despite all the workout and pumping iron, we also can get hurt deep inside when you play around with our feelings. But, hey I still love you!

This is in fond remembrance of Cahndru, who passed away last Sunday in an unfortunate accident at a waterfall. This is also a reminder to people that you can never ever predict stuff. Please be careful when there is water around. Just be careful…always. This is a hear-felt request. Chandru, we miss you.

I hate...

2006-03-18T10:15:00.000-08:00

This is indeed a strange tag. I have been tagged by IfITellYaI’llHaveToKillYa to come up a list of things that I hate. And, it comes at a time, when I have really tried hard to convince myself beyond doubt that I don’t hate anything. I dislike but, I do not hate. It may seem stupid, but somewhere along the line I realized that the more you hate things, the more they start to get to you. So, I’ll make a little change to the terms of the tag. I’ll list things/people that I dislike in no particular order.

I started out by listing ‘things’, but then I ran out of stuff to list. Here is a new one slightly redone.

Thus, I cannot stand…

1. …people who try to invade your privacy. Everyone has stuff that they would like to keep to themselves because they are private. It could be anything – secrets, emotions, relationships or whatever. The point is respect that. I absolutely detest people trying to read over my shoulder when I am writing something.
2. …people who try to bend others to get their way. Everyone has a right to be allowed to think. At the same time learn to stand up for yourself. If you don’t then you are no different from that little ball of plasticine that can either be molded into a nice little figure of a Greek God or an ugly, evil looking phallus.
3. …Windows. Or any Microsoft product. They are terrible. Period.
4. … the feeling of acidic burning after an especially long session of drinking.
5. … not being able to tell someone that you love them, when that is the only thing you want to do. The only thing that is left to do.
6. …the thought that someday because of this inability to express myself, I just might end up all alone in a little one-bedroom flat in the middle of a huge city somewhere in the world.
7. …exactly two people in the world. These are the only two cases where probably the dislike borders on intense hate. Fuckhead’s is one and the other one – I hope you get castrated by some fanatical Neo-Nazis.

That’s all I guess. The rest, if any, I have learnt to live with. It’s been a difficult post to write. I guess it is true when they say it is easier to love than to hate. I bet I could come up with fifty things that I love in a jiffy, but seven things that I hate took me three long days.

Kindly bear with all the abstraction. I promise to post something that involves watching porn, naked women, drunken standup comedy and other politically incorrect things soon.

Hey look...

2006-03-07T00:54:00.000-08:00

I added a counter to my blog. Now, when i hit the big numbers I can proudly flaunt my status as a popular blogger. With absolutely no shame, here goes...tell all your friends and folks about my blog. Send them a link and ask them to read it!

Thankyou all you lovely people.

Oh...and Iffitellyaillhavetokillya tagged me to write a list of things that I hate. I am working on it. It should be up soon...God promise!

Om

2006-02-28T21:52:00.000-08:00

This weekend a bunch of guys and me, we simply packed our bags and took for a weekend to lots of sun, sandy beaches and bikini clad babes. We got all of that and some brilliant pics that I shall put online soon and I saw my first topless woman. Funnily enough, that and all the scantily clad women, who were absolute bombshells, did not even make the least difference to me.
Gah…guess I am a goner!

Oh..by the way, visit Om beach in Gokarna if you can!
Incident, our annual cul-fest starts today, but strangely I am not looking forward to it.

Lost in Time

2006-02-22T20:33:00.000-08:00

When you suddenly find that you are missing time, then something is really weird or something somewhere has gone terribly wrong. Consider this…

I distinctly remember looking at my watch, which read about 3:20pm, when I left the lab and walked about a hundred and fifty meters to the little shack. Allowing for five minutes to dawdle and the average walking speed of humans being about 4kmph I must have reached the shack at approximately in about 167 seconds or about 2.7 minutes. Again, I shall approximate it to 5 minutes. Which means I reached the shack at 3:30pm, when I lit a cigarette and smoked it.

Krishna gave me the cup of coffee as I stubbed out the cigarette. The time should now read about 3:35pm, because I know for a fact that I take about five minutes on the average to smoke a fag.

I glance at my watch which read 4:00pm now!!!!! I simply have no recollection about 25 minutes except a dull pain around my temple. I haven’t blacked out or fallen because then I would have woken up in a hospital or with water on my face. Which wasn’t the case. I don’t know what happened, but I just lost twenty-five minutes of my life and I have no clue.

I know this must sound like a blurb out of some sci-fi movies about aliens, but I swear all this is 100% true. I checked out all the times with my friends. Am I going crazy?

“I just cant help myself, I’m feeling like I’m going out of my head. Uncanny strange déjà vu, but I don’t mind. I hope to find the truth…”

Strange déjà vu, Scenes from a Memory - Dream Theater.

Please help me...

2006-02-16T01:18:00.000-08:00

Honestly, what’s the easiest way to commit a suicide? Fast and quick?

Asshole's Fables

2006-02-06T21:55:00.000-08:00

A little boy woke up on a bright Sunday morning feeling all happy and healthy. Then he proceeded to learn more about his country and about its glorious past. In the after noon he ate cold and refreshing butterscotch ice-cream.
In the evening he went with his friend to a pub and drank himself senseless. He stared at a hot lady in a white dress who was smoking and drinking coffee in the pub. He did not stare because he had carnal thoughts on his mind, but simply because he was drunk like a dead cockroach and was unable to move his head. She happened to be in the line of his vision.
On his way back he felt very bad about having eaten so much of calories and for having consumed so much of alcohol. It would make his tummy that was flattening of late into a junkyard of fat. So, he came back and asked a fat friend to stand on his foot as he did a hundred and fifty stomach crunches. He then felt a little better. Then, some one called him on his battered cell phone and he spoke for forty minutes. It was someone he hadn’t spoken to in a long time. Some one he missed.
He continued his workout with thirty leg lifts and thirty push ups at the end of which he was competing with his unwashed sweaty socks. Out of concern for his room mate, he bathed.
He slept that night at four, thinking while waiting to fall asleep.
He woke up the next day at seven in the morning and attended eleven straight hours of class. People asked him all day long whether he had returned from Ethiopia. He slept early and the next day he wrote this story.

Moral of the story
One pinacolada, one kamikaze, two fire shooters and a thirty-shot of Romanov and exercise don’t go together. Not if you want to feel like a chewing gum that has been chewed for sixteen hours.
But they make for good timepass writing…

Drink responsibly. Don’t puke in the pub.

The babe wore red...

2006-02-02T01:09:00.000-08:00

This is a story that I wrote for the college yearbook. Please tell me what you think about it people.

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

The bullets slammed into the wooden walls one after the other. Somewhere in the distance cannons boomed, the shells landing on households – the shrapnel shredding everything in its path, including human flesh – innocent or not.

The concept of innocence and guilty became skewed in the middle of an armed struggle. Brainwashed and disillusioned, young boys picked up guns when they should have been playing with toys and reading books. The heat of youth was what the ‘leaders’ counted on for a win. The reckless abandon that children enjoyed, they turned into a killing machine.

Ajay crouched with his wife, Anjali, and little Yatin in the corner. Anjali shielded Yatin with her body, lest he be hurt by flying debris. Ajay held the old rifle tightly, aware that if the militants stormed in, he had little chance of protecting his family. He was a man pulled into the fight against his will and wish. Neighbors with whom they had celebrated Id and Diwali, with the same joy were now mortal enemies.

Religion that had meant nothing more than simply a God to believe in, no matter what he was called, and to pray to in times of sorrow had split them apart. This wasn’t something that he or his neighbors had done. It was the result of dirty politics played in carpeted corridors and halls in the capital. It was the result of a few fanatical men who stopped at nothing to achieve what they believed in. No price was too high – not even a few thousand innocent deaths.

Yatin was barely a year old. The noise and Anjali’s tight grip made the baby scream at the top of his lungs. It was only a matter of time before they would be killed. Anjali fervently prayed, hoping for a miracle. The bullets continued to throw splinters over them. She wrapped her white shawl even more tightly around the baby. A drop of warm blood fell from a cut on her face on Yatin’s face and then slowly dissolved in the tears and flowed down his cheeks staining them crimson.

Kashmir that had once been paradise on earth had turned into a hell beyond imagination. The partition had created an irreversible situation. Strategically, the valley was important to both countries. Whoever controlled the mountains had the upper hand and neither side wanted to give that up.

Rashid ran from behind the low wall and took cover behind the shop on the corner. He had been hit by a stray bullet on the leg. He took a moment to recover his breath and planned his next move. He wasn’t going to last long. The bullet had severed several arteries and he was loosing blood fast. His end was near and he knew that. He just wanted to take as many as he could with him. He didn’t fear death as the others did. They had taught him that he would reach Heaven. He checked the safety on the AK-47 for the nth time.

Rashid was one of those who, by an unfortunate turn of events, had picked up the gun. It had happened quite sometime back. Eight months to be precise. He had returned home in the evening to find the front door open and a strange quietness that chilled his blood. He went in expecting the worst and found it. His family had been massacred –his mother, wife and three sisters. Their bodies riddled beyond recognition. He ran inside to see if the baby was still alive. The crib was empty. The rattle lay broken on the floor.

Rashid ignored the pain and fixed his sight on the house. It was a modest wooden structure – nondescript and plain like the hundred and thousand of houses in the valley. Between him and the front doors lay fifty yards of deserted road. He lifted his rifle and sprinted across the road. Bullets whined past and thumped harmlessly into the sidewalk. He burst in through the door, breaking it clean off its hinges with his sheer momentum. He began firing blindly.

Ajay and Anjali had been married three years and they were still childless. They had tried everything – medicines, treatment in the hospitals, quacks – but nothing seemed to work. Ajay taught history in the local school and Anjali sold flowers on the corner. Despite the circumstances, they were happy and in love with each other. She waited for him on the doorstep everyday in the evening. That day, he was late. Ajay walked past the house, when he heard the moans from inside. He walked inside to see a young girl in her finals moments of agony before dying. The bodies lay around bathed in blood. Then he heard the baby cry. He went inside and saw the little baby. He made his decision in an instant. He walked towards the baby and stepped on a rattle that lay there. He had picked the baby boy, wrapped in a shawl and taken it home. That was eight months ago.

The first bullet caught Anjali in the chest and she was dead before she hit the floor. Ajay took two bullets in his left arm, but managed to get a shot off before the next bullet blew his head apart. The rifle was loaded with buck shot and Rashid caught it full in the face. Yatin screamed as blood drenched him. He continued to scream as the blood soaked the shawl red.

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

That's about it for now. I went to see Rang De Basanti last Sunday. This very very pretty girl half my year is dying to talk to came and talked to me. Yes...she came and asked me f I could buy extra tickets for her. I said I would try but in the end I couldnt manage. Oh...that look on her face. Damn..! Oh and she is at least a couple of years older and from what I have heard women don't dig younger men.

Sigh!

Yet another tag!

2006-01-31T01:30:00.000-08:00

Well…I got tagged again. This time by If I tell ya, I’ll have to kill ya. Now, the thing I have to do is to write a fictional piece that is about a 100-200 words long and includes the following words, which are to be used only once.

“I, me, blowjob, grapes, random, power, loneliness, water, robot, and blue”

It was raining that night. Heavily. The strong wind didn’t make things any easier for him. He stood under the awning of the pawnshop, waiting. His coat and his hat dripped. If it bothered him, he did not show it. He smoked a cigarette, the tip glowing brighter as he sucked on it. The brim of his hat threw a shadow on his face. The dim yellow light from the street lamp lit his chin and the ugly scar on it. He looked at his watch, flicked the cigarette away and tapped thrice on the glass door.

A wizened old man, opened the door and let him in. The water dripped on the carpet.

“Is he in yet?”, he demanded of the old man.

“Don’t know. He always comes in through the back door. He has the key.”

He walked inside. It was dark, but he knew his way around. The light was on inside the chamber. He knocked on the door and entered. The blue folder lay on the desk. Mario sat on the swivel chair playing the flute. He stopped when he saw him.

“Do you have the plans for the robot?”

“Yeah…they’re here.” He patted his pocket.

“Put them down on the table and here, take your 5 grand for the trouble.”

“The price jus’ went up. Ten thousand.”

“Get the hell outta here. What do you think I am? Some random idiot? F*** you!”

Mario pulled out a gun knocking the fruit bowl. The grapes rolled away. He shot Mario in the head. The power of the shot made the dead man topple over. The old man came running in.

He stepped over the body and picked up the flute. He looked at Mario, who was missing a head now. He turned around and faced the old man.
“Nice blowjob, eh? Pity he ain’t no match fer me.”

He stepped out of the room and made his way to the foyer, followed by the wizened old man. He opened the front door and walked away into the dark lonliness.

And there it is.Yeah…I know it’s way too pathetic for words. But hell, how do you put all these words into something so small.

And…by the way, M, wtmewry and silverine are tagged.

Shoot me, please...

2006-01-24T01:47:00.000-08:00

I have reached the point in life where nothing makes sense at all. I am so fucking lost , I can't find a reason for continuing with life.

Will someone please shoot me?

I study Software Engineering Principles

2006-01-13T02:11:00.000-08:00

I promised to myself that I wouldn’t blog for sometime…I think I said two months but, I am bad at math and worse at keeping up promises. Actually, I have started jogging, gymming, cut down on booze and for the first time in three years done an assigment on my own. So that’s, lets see…four out of five…which is 80%. Yipee! No attendance shortage!

Now, the key to being an engineering student is the ability to copy shamelessly. Assignments, projects, test, quizzes, exams…just about anything. I mean, after all, engineers are supposed to make things simpler and copying an assignment is a lot simpler than doing it. But now and then, conscience decides to check in for work and that little caterpillar in the top had and colored suit is one major nasty pain. Mine checked in to work day-before.

There are bad subjects and there are worse subjects and then there is Software Engineering. The teacher who teaches that one is two years older than I am, slightly cute ( at any rate cuter than all the girls in my class with make up and 98% than all other women in my college). The subject is, essentially, a whole lot of ways to makes writing a program a hell of a lot more complicated than particle physics. If you can write a whole book on how a program is to be written in the vaguest of terms, then you can go ahead write one and then be cursed by students who use your book. Here…screw you Pressman.

There are four fundamental steps in the development of a software product or solution. They are, namely:
1. Software specification. It is the process of formally specifying the requirements in a structured manner in consultation with the client. In addition, it may also involve team structuring and project scheduling tasks.
2. Software development. This is the phase where the coding for the solution to be developed happens. It also focuses on issues such as system configuration and deployment situations.
3. Software verification and validation. In this phase the product is tested to see whether it does what it was meant to accomplish. This is called verification. Validation is the process of testing the product with a large range of available data and then checking the output against standard pre-computed results.
4. Software evolution. Customer needs change over time. A good software product must be adaptable to suit the needs of a client. The developer should be able to adapt it to the needs of the client, with minimal amount of change to it.

Never mind if you didn’t understand all of that. I’ll put it a little more simply, by way of a small example.
1. Client: “I want to wash my behind after I am done taking a dump.”
Tech Lead : “So…that will be…Sterilizing and disinfecting the posterior after the completion of passing stools.”
C: “No…no…I don’t use a stool, I use a Western style toilet.”
TL: “Yes, sir, but that factor will hike up the project expenditure by a factor of ten.”
C: “I have to clean my ass…do it!”

2. TL: “Now…how do we clean the ass?”
Bright Young Techie : “I know it…we use water”
TL: “Yes…excellent…extra roti at lunch for you. Note that down…WATER. This is a key focus area.”
BYT: “But saar…how do we collect it?”
TL: “Let us use a polymer container that is portable and eco-friendly … a plastic mug!”
BYT:”Saar…there is an extra one in the toilet on third floor. Shall I get it?”
TL: ”Excellent managerial thought…go get it and take another roti for this brilliant cost- effective thought”

3. TL: “Okay, team now lets see if this actually is efficient in pouring water on the rear…Drop your pants, kiddos!”
[BYTs dutifully drop their pants and TL pours the water]
TL: “Eureka…it works…”[strips naked and runs to the Project Manager’s cabin]
TL: “Sir…we have verified that the product is functioning”
PM : “Excellent…two extra rotis for you and a tomato for the rest of your team. Now validate it. Wash everyone’s ass with that for the rest of the day.”

4. C: “Oh…this is excellent! I have never seen anything like this…”
PM: “Yeah…cut the crap. Where’s the payment?”
[Two days later]
C: “We have water shortage at our site. And the desert heat is drying up all the tanks. We need some help with our asses.”
PM: “Don’t worry, we’ll get right back to you”
PM: “TL, we need to evolve our solution. The customer has a shortage of essential input.”
TL: “I ask my team to get on to it.”
TL: “Team we have a problem….No water on the client side. What do we do?”
BYT: “Saar…saar…Toilet paper!”
TL: “Excellent…you can do the verification and validation this time”
BYT: "Saar...can I just have extra roti?"

That, my dear people, is software engineering principles in a nutshell.

I worked on that till half-past four in the morning, put in a case study for good measure and found that it isn’t due for submission for another three days.

Next post: Internet Technologies and Applications to e-Commerce.

Leave of absence.

2005-12-29T22:10:00.000-08:00

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?

I started with...

2005-12-26T18:36:00.000-08:00

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.

Of chappals and of fakes...

2005-12-24T02:04:00.000-08:00

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!

Hmm...

2005-12-21T00:13:00.000-08:00

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.

Tagged!

2005-12-20T05:41:00.000-08:00

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!

Hey...

2005-06-21T07:47:00.001-07:00

I really hat throwing people from web page to web page, but I am so used to LJ, that moving to blogspot is turning out to be very difficult....

Here's a link to my blog >>>>> It's a Jungle out there...
Do leave coments on my blog....

adios amigo/senorita!