Hullabaloo

These days the media has so much to chew on! From Amjad Ali Khan's broken sarod to Rakhi Sawant's latest music video. Gone are the days when I used to wait all week for "The World this Week". Now it's all about pseudo intellectuals who are too busy trying to blow up every triviality. Some how I hated watching Amjad Ali Khan's interviews on TV where he laments over his sarod. While this might help to keep hopeless entities like Air India on the alert, on the other hand, it looks like too much of footage to an accident.
Damn! I am not sure whether to hate the coverage or to like it.
On a side note: Currently reading John Irving's The Imaginary Girlfriend. Loving every bit of it. Contrary to what the title suggests, it's about his experience at being mediocre at what he loved the most - wrestling. I can connect with every thought pattern of his. Being a good-for-nothing at even the things I love, I find his attitude as a guiding light!
Looking forward to reading yet another Nrisimha Prasad after this one.
Oh and yes, to hell with purists - Sherlock Holmes is not that bad.

I am Bach

...packing a bigger punch than Arnie. In the ever ongoing fight with lazyness, let this be an emphatic (though might-be temporary) victory.

For four years I have been mentally visualizing this state of my life. The state of transition when I wouldn't have any work commitments; knowledge transition would be over and I can lie back and breathe deeply, take a look at the surroundings and be amazed at how the same old place would start looking less-frustration-inducing. But when I am finally here, I don't feel anything. Nothing feels different. May be I am still not mentally detached or may be the last one and a half years have already made me acclimatized to this freedom.

Whetver the case is, it is always good to overcome inertia and to move. Be it out of an organization or into the cyberspace via this entry.

PPT for Love

Love and hurt are as inseparable as roads and pollution, beer and beer belly, cell-phones and promotional calls and code and bugs. No matter how hard guys try, the answer to that all important question as to what women want always seems elusive. Well, even Freud didn’t know. Even if he did, he didn’t tell us, probably under threat or coercion from the different publications who make a living out of running personal-help columns. Through the ages, we have had billions of people spending sleepless nights and doze-less afternoons, lost in their relationship equations with almost a thousand variables (comprising cards, cakes, movies, fights, differences, preferences, parental guidance and so on…).

So, if you think your love life can be much more challenging and confusing to debug than a million lines of badly documented code, think again. Here’s presenting the latest revolutionary philosophy which solves your problems even before they might appear. Lovingly referred to as the Predictive Problem-solving Technique or PPT, this should be your key to sublime happiness. You’d never ever need to write to those agony columns again.

PPT has involved painstaking research on terabytes of data over many love and life cycles, hours of doodling, fiddling around with pencils and dozens of sandwiches. As the old Martian saying goes: every problem can either be solved or dissolved; PPT predicts that all the relationship equations can be reduced to two basic inequations, and all relationship queries or problems can be grouped into two basic questions:
1. I am in love with (some-girly-name) but I am scared that if I come clean about my feelings, she might say “No” and I might lose her friendship. What should I do?
2. I was in love with (some/same-girly-name) but everything that she liked about me before the relationship started, now gets her mad at me. What should I do?
The answers are simple
1. Don’t get scared as long she doesn’t say “Yes”.
2. Refer to Answer 1. We told you so.
So there you are, all your present/future problems are encapsulated and solved even before they appear. Stop bothering about relationships heading to heaven or hell and just enjoy the ride. And about PPT, Agony Uncle urges all to keep it a secret till it is patented and Uncle moves on to more critically important research on a statistical tool to predict and deal with sudden urges to break into laughter during grave teleconferences or group meetings.

This is your life...

and you open the door
and you step inside
we're inside our hearts
now imagine your pain
is a white ball of healing light
that's right, feel your pain,
the pain itself,
is a white ball of healing light
i don't think so
this is your life
good to the last drop,
doesn't get any better than this
this is your life, and it's ending
one minute at a time
this isn't a seminar
and this isn't a weekend retreat
where you are now
you can't even imagine
what the bottom will be like

only after disaster
can we be resurrected
it's only after you've lost
everything that you're
free to do anything
nothing is static,
everything is evolving,
everything is
falling apart
you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake
you are the same decaying
organic matter as everything else
we are all a part of the same compost heap
we are the all-singing,
all-dancing crap of the world
you are not your bank account,
you are not the clothes you wear
you are not the contents of your wallet
you are not your bowel cancer
you are not your grande latte
you are not the car you drive
you are not your fucking khakis
you have to give up
you have to realise that someday you will die,
until you know that you are useless
i say let me never be complete
i say may i never be content
i say deliver me from swedish furniture
i say deliver me from clever art
i say deliver me from clear skin and perfect teeth
i say you have to give up
i say evolve, and let the chips
fall where they may
i want you to hit me as hard as you can
welcome to fight club
if this is your first night you have to fight

A few years after I watched this movie for the first time, I rediscovered this piece accidentally today. It's goose-pimples all over again!

Life, Death and Everything

A sense of helplessness, shock, grief and overpowering anger. This is what everyone must be feeling right now. The worst part is, inspite of the losses, we would all go back to our routine lives with a ridiculous ease. We are getting used to this, aren't we? Infact how many of us have deviated from our routine lives even under this situation?

Still it feels good to see people cheering our security forces, prodiving them with snacks and moral support as they die so that we can live.

I just wish I could be in Mumbai.

I am Falling...

Ardent followers of my blog (me, myself and my virtual pet cat, Bimbo) know that I have always accomplished the mammoth task of unravellling the mysteries of life, universe and everything here, be it the deeper meaning of life or the spiritual context of some monkey slapping the other. Now, It's high time I took another small step for a man and a giant leap for mankind - the one that might make people take giant leaps out of their balconies/windows into the nothingness below.
Today I will expose the biggest mistake in the history of mankind:
Long, long ago (in the 1660s), a middle-aged man who had as exciting a social life as that of a dead tree (comparable to mine, but I can atleast talk to myself; being a psycho helps), had nothing else to do on a lazy afternoon. He was meandering across his garden, watching the snails compete on a cross-terrain race, and shouting encouragements, and occasionally glancing at the clouds taking different shapes in the overhead sky. But he didn't stop there, and that's why I have to hit my keyboard hundreds of years later now, when I could have comfortably read out self-decomposed unwritten poems to my virtual companion, Bimbo.
Back in the garden, the guy sat under an apple tree and having been utterly neglected by the snails, started recounting to the tree, the incident when once he was standing at the platform, waiting for his train and was thrown a few yards away by an ill-tempered middle-aged lady who was rushing to catch her train and collided with him on the way. He had struggled back on his feet, taken his pink notebook out and written his sudden realization down: "Every body continues to be in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line unless acted on by some unbalanced force to act otherwise", when he was thrown off by a few meters in the other direction by another collision with the same lady who had realised that she was running after the wrong train.
The apple tree was so moved by the story that it wished it had legs to literally move away to save its life, but obviously it coudn't. The ordeal was particularly frustrating for the apple in the lowest branch, nearest to him and his words. As a last ditch effort to put an end to this, it fell.
It just fell and hit His head. He looked up, down, right and left; scratched his head and took his pink notebook out. The rest as they say is history.. er..physics, sorry! He noted down something which he called the law of gravitation which deals with how bodies with mass attract each other. The law, which is not consistent with quantum mechanics and even doesn't have experimental evidence on what actually causes it.
The mistake he made was to look outwards while the answer lay within.

What he didn't realise is that life sucks. It did then, as it does now. His life did, my life does. Gravity is a hoax.
Life sucks the happiness out of you as with apples from a tree. When your expensive vase tips over to fall on the floor and dissolves into a million pieces, when an important sheet of paper disappears into a man-hole, when a Sachin Tendulkar skier lands on Symonds' palms or when people fall (from grace) in love, it's only life's way of reminding us:
Life Sucks.

Acknowledgements: The discussion I had with a friend once and a T-shirt.

Apologies to: All my physics teachers from school/college.

P.S. The race was won by a snail called Appy Singh.

Street Hawk!

In the last few days, my literary adventures have been limited to filling in laptop declaration forms at the entry and exit of my (what Dilbert would call) sensory deprivation chamber. Having been too lazy to look at a workaround (not that it was dancing in front of my eyes, in a kathakali costume), I have been going through the daily routine of writing my name, project details, machine serial numbers, and striking out names of the portable media devices that I don't carry. Occasionally though, I have juggled with the idea of writing Sukumar Ray-esque verses or Didi-esque slogans on the margins to spice up the proceedings, but then I have, till now been successful in fighting that instinct.
It's been a long time since I last blessed cyberspace with my dripping-with-wisdom words and if some people had been celebrating the halt in server space wastage, I have only one thing to say: Sorry to disappoint you folks, but I am back and today I will write about my bicycle.

It has got two tyres, a seat, derailleurs, handle bars and a sense of humour.
In the early nineties when people my age were crazy about cycles with thick-as-a-boa constrictor tyres and herculean frames, I got myself a black, sleek, "super light city bike" - as it used to be advertised. I learnt cycling on it, something which the wise men advise against. This learning business, according to them, is best done on other's machines, for it's quite taxing on the vehicle.
My bicycle took the blows generously. I have always been a fair weather friend to it, always slipping away at the last moment whenever I sensed a tumble, specially while learning to get down. I have banged on walls while trying stunts, on other cyclists while trying I dont know what; I have skid through the road while trying to swap hands on the handlebars (try it, it's not that easy) and knifed through every pool of stagnant water on the road just for the fun of it. But it has never complained, except for making strange noises, especially after a mud-bath.
Oh and yes, it has got a wicked brain too.
Whenever I'd be on the middle of a crossing with vehicles charging in from all directions:
1. The brakes would stop working.
2. The bell would get jammed.
And I would invariably have to:
1. Throw my legs at the ground to get some friction so that I can bring it to halt before I bring someone down on the road.
2. Be amazed at how smooth the brakes and bell would work just at the next moment when not needed. Especially infront of the mechanic who would, in turn be amazed at someone bringing a cycle with perfectly functioning parts for repair.
But riding it was/is great fun. You cannot compare anything to the feeling of the breeze sliding through the crew-cut hair (specially the region above the ears and back of the head!) while pedalling through the beautiful roads of my hometown.
Our relationship has suffered many lows, like the one when one of my friends rode it to meet his girlfriend (you don't need to lend things to school buddies, they just get them from you when they want! ) in a cybercafe and completely forgetting about it's existence, took a romantic rickshaw ride out of the shop to her home. The next afternoon saw a whirlwind of activities including:
1. My calling him to get my cycle back and his rushing to my place and declaring that it was left in front of some cybercafe.
2. The two of us rushing to the cybercafe, obviously not finding my cycle outside, quizzing the security guard, being told that probably it might have been picked up my some mobile police van and that we need to go to the police to have any hopes of getting it back.
3. Under the advice of the security guard, going to the nearest police station, meeting the Kader Khan look-alike inspector and his taking out a map of the city and after many minutes of pan-chewing, telling us that area falls under some other police station.
4. Our calling up an uncle of my friend who besides being a blind Ganguly fan is some high official in the police force, his tracking the cycle down to some police station, and finally our reaching there, finding it reclining against a cell and getting it without much hassles, thanks to the background work done by our beloved "Ganguly-Uncle".
5. My kicking that friend on his backside - one that would make Roberto Carlos proud (Well, not really. I was infact too relieved to get my black beauty back. So much so, that I even dropped him home, on it of course).

It's still there. The roads, though changing quite fast, are still quite pretty and the air too has more of oxygen than carbon monoxide. Even now, whenever I go home, I take it out, dust it and go out on my royal excursions.

As one wise man had once remarked:

If you have a perfectly conditioned cycle, you don't need a girlfriend.

(Go hang yourself if you haven't yet figured out who that wise man is!)

Acknowledgements:

1. NC for that rickshaw ride and the discussion on rickshaws and bringing back memories of my black beauty.
2. Hero cycles for making "Impact". As you can see, that had quite an impact!