Completing a moment

So often we miss an upbeat rythm or celtic music in the background to complete a moment. Was watching some parts of the movie metro and suddenly got into a nap of imagination.

Just imagine a band of musicians carrying mouth organ, a violin and an acoustic guitar following you everywhere waiting to complete a moment.

Imagine what if the drums start rolling and “highway to hell” starts playing in the midair as soon as we come out of our examination hall.

Or imagine the life falling into slow motion as soon as you hit a six in gully cricket.

Imagine the atmosphere change into sepia mode as soon as one starts recounting good old school days sitting with friends.

Imagine getting hold of a camera every time a kid gives a cute smile or when the sun just perfectly hides behind a cloud.

Moments come and go. Life splashes new colours almost everyday. Wish it rained whenever we felt like it, to make these colours the precise tinge of blue which makes our heart all nostalgic.

Sarcasm

It seems ages ago when i didn’t have anything sarcastic to say. Sarcasm has got woven into my system. When a simplest innocent statement like “hey look the stars are so bright”, would force me to say “Obviously, why else do u think celebrities are called stars”.

I don’t know what has caused this change. Whether it is the unending desire to make oneself above all worldly desires or a total monotony which has plagued my life. Dont know whether it really matters to me at all. The creative satisfaction in dismissing anything and everything said by anybody has made me numb. Feel like telling myself “ hey you forgot to add ‘comfortably’ before numb”.

Election junk - Night at the museum1

Never underestimate the entertainment production capabilities of politics – this is one thing which i learnt lately. After seeing last year’s run up to the elections and the result and how randomness crept into the most methodical elections ever possible, this year was bit of a disappointment till a few days back. But that was before the night of 26 august.

Lets name the characters involved. We are talking about two “sets” of people. Set 1 is P having elements {a,b} ( not using {S,M} instead... don’t know when i might cross one of the countless rules made by uncle and his gang). Set2 has been the one which has taken the hit. Initially {w,x,y,z}εG but then it was not to be.

It all started with rumours that the night had gone crazy. Some supporter of ‘x’ got beaten up. Some said the attackers were drunk, some others said it was staged. To heat up the matters and give the rumours more weight sarvi was brought in. I slept off early.

On waking up there were some fresh, blood rushing rumours coming from some of the movers and shakers of politics here. It was said that set P has been cut short to just one element and even set G has been cut short to three. It was like déjà vu. P having just one element is scary coz last time we had φ kumar singh who won all the laurels.

Morning time mess trip was a grapevine convention. The dumbest rumour i heard was “Hey now it seems a girl is going to stand”. Notice boards looked too uneventful for comfort. The gang was playing wait and watch game. In the meanwhile rumours caught more air. Supporters of ‘x’ were keeping quiet on what happened that night. Anti – “Anti-campaigning” is one weapon of the gang which has invoked havoc in the lives of all elements of P and G. ‘x’ people were scared of that.

Night time mess trip was again a disappointment. I searched all the nook n corner of the mess entrance to trace the gang’s verdict, but all in vain.

At night 8 30 the verdict came. One of the elements from G was shown the door. The aristocratic language used by the gang in explaining the termination was above my perceptive skills. It was devoid of words like violence, sarvi, anc, blood, alcohol etc.

Its fun to observe the most systematic polls possible in our country, brushing itself with anarchy so often. Two more days to go and i am eagerly waiting.

“ The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well.”

Election junk

This post is inspired from one of the coolest bitsian blog post which i read last year which was instrumental in pushing me into this time killing tirade of blogging, a cynical post on last year’s election by atin bhattacharya http://atinbhattacharya.blogspot.com/2008/08/why-so-serious-son.html.

This post is a combined effort (sounds like we are launching a satellite) of Prashanth aka pomp aka skyindian aka abhinav aka ramesh aka etc... and me.

The following are the points that we agree deliver if by some stroke of luck, anarchy or because of some cosmic catastrophe one of us is made prez.

1. Candle bulk booking – in the wake of this power crisis, let’s all burn candles, the ghoting season is coming soon(having A7 and A3 people in the same mess can’t make me think of anything else other than acads). Bulk bookings of candles and hand held fans will be carried out by SU. We are in contact with major candle makers who have agreed to supply candles of all sizes, colours, aroma, low on carbon emissions etc.

2. Super thrust nuclear powered flushes – we promise to have this new technology installed in all hostel bogs. Dirty bogs has given me nightmares after waking up in the morning. “Black Thunder” is also in fray so can’t take a risk.

3. Ghot Bunkers – these bunkers will be created for all the gaming addict CDC students who want to ghot but cant live without the deafening voices of bullets and fellow humans.

These bunkers will have all the audio (from canon’s bursting... to “Go!!!Go!!! Go!!!”) to keep the addicts sane while they try to study. In case of overwhelming urge to kill other souls, there will be baskets full of LGMF provided in the bunker.

4. Chewing gum defaulters – this point has been a matter of havoc for my co-author who has spent sleepless nights figuring out ways to punish the defaulters. An excerpt from his dormant domer blog

“Chewing Gum on Chairs...Yuck!!!

If you have been a victim of this form of terrorism....Welcome to the club. We shall strongly comdemn these actions. These are acts of cowardice and the perpetrators shall be...er...ok..ok.

If you have done this blasphemy, be warned...the Mafia never forgets....one day your laptop keypad will be smeared with chewed gum ( only Center Fresh allowed ).”

5. Camels – it was great disappointment for most of the people who came from different parts of the country to study in the state of rajasthan and to find themselves bereft of camel rides. So camels will be available as a mode of transport in the campus. It will be available for sale in nutan market soon. Once everyone on the campus has a camel each, the next years freshers can buy the camels from psenti semites. They will be called camel pops.

6. Illumination- As the swine flu and rakhi sawant’s swayamvar has caused the nation huge emotional and mental loss respectively, we would like to conduct musical chair, tambola, rock-paper-scissors etc along with the few elite enlightened souls on campus who had set gym-g on fire last year.

Last but not the least (the original cliché) “this is a dictatorship, defaulters will be shot dead”

Friends lost and forgotten

I was recently reminded about my childhood neighbourhood friends, on the mention of friendship day. The following is a memoir regarding the same.

From my days in kindergarten to class 4 i lived in this locality called sardarpur. We used to live in a rented place. Somehow thinking about those days makes me smile. The place where i lived had a lot of other tenants in the same compound as well as many neighbours. And i had a whole ‘toli’ of friends. When i was trying to remember the names, it was so cool that i was actually able to remember many of them. There were these 2 brothers in the next house called ashish and vaibhav (i guess). Then there were 3 sisters kamini didi, bhawna (my age) and khushboo (an year or two younger). Apart from that there was a stout guy called bittu of my age living some houses away. There was also my landlords daughter, Munna( she insisted on us calling her meena instead). And of course my brother , who was an integral part of all this.

There were some more. My memory is playing hide and seek with me but there is one thing which i am sure of and that is, those were days of fun.

I remember one incidence when a dog gave birth to a lot of puppies in a vacant plot opposite our house. We were excited that we all took one puppy each back to our respective place and gave them name etc, only to be forced back by our parents.

We had a neighbour in her 50s i think. The whole locality used to call her ‘bhua’. She was a matter of fright for us kids coz we couldn’t afford to cross a certain decibel limit in front of her. It was fun to do some mischief and run away from her sight.

There was also one huge bungalow(adjacent to hotel india international) behind our house which was fully vacant except for a caretaker. It looked like the stereotypical haunted bungalows except that it was not haunted. Most of our time in our summer holidays used to be spent there. From flying kites to playing cricket and eating “Bandar ke papadi”... we did it all. I remember one day morning we all took one mango seed and planted it in the premises of that bungalow and promised each other that we will give water to that plant everyday (we did also for some days). We were told that a mango seed takes 5 years to sprout and so we thought we would come back some day to visit that plant... never happened. There also used to be huge eucalyptus trees in that premises and we used to take the seed shells which used to fall and make it rotate like a top. It used to be fun. I also remember going on the top most roof of that place and sitting there. I wonder how much my parents knew about this.

Most of the kids of my age were sadly girls and i had invariably nothing else to do but play girlish role play games with them at times. Other past times included playing WWE card games with Bittu, watching cartoon network at ashish’s place( my place had only doordarshan then)... my mind is flooding with flashes of some of the places of that street where we used to play cricket, burst crackers, chase dogs and pigs with stones as weapons and what not ... and mind you i was not even 10 by then.

It has been more than a decade since i visited that house. Just for curiosities sake, me and my brother took our bike to that street some days back only to find that place too alien and small(maybe those days our eyes were just 3 feet above the ground and hence it looked bigger) But the memories still are so fresh and vivid. I have a desire to meet all those old friends of mine. Don’t know where they are now or how they look. I just hope they still remember me.

Bhavnagar Express

Travelling alone in an off season train was something new. The kind of crowd was totally different from that of the vacation season. The trains then are filled fully with either people travelling with anticipation about some holiday trip or people coming back from one. And hence the mood inside is always very upbeat. This time the train had an older population (there was only one person younger than me in the whole boogie). There were businessmen travelling home, grandmothers visiting their kids and others who had specific reasons for their travels.

In my compartment there was one woman who looked like my grandmother and another woman who looked like her mother ( i mean quiet old) though she looked beautiful( looked like a character directly taken out from the malgudi days). First the older lady stares at my reader’s digest which i was reading. I thought of offering her another copy of reader’s digest that i had, for her to go through the pictures in that but thought it might sound humiliating. Then this older lady tries striking a conversation with me but realises it fast that telugu is not my thing. Then she tries asking me in her broken Hindi about what i do and stuff. She looked very amused when i told her that i was studying engineering. It was really great to be able to converse with her.

Then there was another old lady who was having a seat along with me in the side births and i happened to have the lower birth. As soon as i entered, i started to feel sleepy and i didn’t have anything else to do. So i offered to take that lady’s upper birth and went to sleep. Little did i realise then that the selfish offer of taking the upper birth would be so revered by her (i guess she was planning to ask me to take the upper birth herself some time later). The rest of the night, the lady and her son(must have been in early 30s) did all they could to show their gratitude. From enquiring about my dinner arrangements to offering a banana which they bought from a station, i was more of a guest to them than a co-passenger. Finally they were about to get down at Kalyan Jn. (Mumbai) at 4:30early morning. It was raining. My sleep broke and i offered to carry their luggage till the gate( it included all sorts of stuff... clothes, oil cans, utensils fruits etc.). Just before they were to alight in kalyan, the guy gave me his phone number and asked me to give him a call whenever i come to Mumbai. My sarcasm and laziness to save the number compelled me to tell him “Dude!!! Do you think i am going to give you a call”. Though i realised that it was the only way he could thank me for helping with the luggage. I just waved him and his mother goodbye and came back to my compartment. Now was it was a time of rendezvous with a Marwari businessman.

By the time i came back to my compartment it was 5:30 and i had enough of sleep and i thought of taking a cup of tea. When i asked a chai wala to give a cup of tea ( on trains its an immiscible mixture of milk, water, sugar syrup and tea powder) the guy on the upper birth asked for one too. I gave the tea guy 10 bucks and he thought it was for both of us and so he went away. Now a wave stuck this Marwari chap. After giving me 5 bucks we got into some gen conversation. He was my only co-passenger till the end of the journey.

By the time i reached Ahmedabad i was really bored. Off season train journeys are no fun.

A few hours in Ahmedabad

After a 24 hour journey in train, i halted at Ahmadabad for a few hours before leaving home. The start of the wait was excruciating, having to stand in the railway station, waiting in the swarm of people. Firstly the junta, including me, were chased of the station lobby and then i survived a life threatening scare of raining stones from the station building. The wait was prolonged when i had to stand in front of vipin’s(my old good friend) apartment for another hour.

But the wait was fruitful for sure coz the rest of the three hours i ended up spending with vipin and prabuddh( another old good school friend) was really great. One good thing that i happen to share with my school friends over bitsian friends is a sense of openness and an absence of sanity.

We dropped off for a cup of coffee at a cafe in the backyard of some building opposite IIM campus. The place is supposedly owned by some mobster and serves one hell of a coffee. I don’t know whether its just me, but i always think coffee and conversations really go along well.

After a stroll we went to this place called zodiac (the ambience was themed on zodiac signs) for our dinner. For a head start, vipin is one person who can get you embarrassed because of his actions in all possible ways and in any place. And he was on his peak that day. Over and above using cheap filthy language( i mean, come on, you can use English for a change even in filth if the locale asks you to) he even made us listen to his poems. When a group of girls came and sat on the next table, he pointed towards them and shouted out “dekha!!!”(trying to point out that Ahmadabad ranks high on face value of females). He summed it all up by stealing the waiter’s tip by reasoning that it is already included in the bill.

At the end of the dinner we left and i boarded my bus back home. But i really cherished the moments i spent with the two remembering the happy old school days and our coaching class.

Gufaa

Ha so one more week over. And EXEX showed its face again this weekend. For your vocabulary’s sake EXEX stands for Expenditure Explosion. Till now i faced exex mostly during our college fests and saw it peak during our department trip to Delhi. But after coming to Hyd, exex has become a weekly affair( rather a weekend affair)and has stuck to me like a pest. And the last weekend was the heights when i spent 3 quarter of a grand on just appetitory pleasures and mind you, i am a teetotaller.

Sunday dinner was at Ohri’s, the best eatery chain in Hyd. And this time we were for a cave experience. The dining place had a cave setting. It looked remarkable. After ‘trying’ to put up something like a cave as a structure last oasis(sorry mojo for being blunt), i must say that this place looked very much like a cave. Other than the rocky walls( plaster of paris i guess) , hanging fire torches and chains along with the dim lighting gave it a complete gothic aura.

To top it all, the waiters had a shikari shambu (does it ring a ‘tinkle’) attire. The menu was like any other high end restaurants with confusing dishes and poverty inducing prices. The food was nothing too special, was good enough.

In all the gufaa was worth an experience.

The Hexagon

More than half a month is over of my stay in Hyderabad. Well the most intriguing of the things here has been our interactions with the autowallahs. More about that in the next post.

                First of all the intro of the people who are concerned with the next post.

 

 

Abhinav- a geek from ’06 batch. His interest in movies( wasn’t it robotics some time back?) brought him here. He says he will be working under a gult director. But since the last 10 days he has done nothing but watched scores of movies and gave rest of us his piece of mind and intelligence. Tell you what his ideas are dangerous to the society, an anti social in the making :P .

 

Anshul – i don’t know how many of you would have noticed him in the music night but the next time you go for please spare one sight for this winnie the pooh lookalike standing like a fielder in slip position, but behind a keyboard. A wanna be rockstar, is presently getting medicated in his PS station along with his sweetheart Arun. An addict with the guitar, spends endless torturous ( for us) hours ‘picking up’ songs.

 

Phani – an instant hit with the girls in his PS mostly because of his gult identity. After a brawl with Arun in the very first night, he admitted that he got caught up with the wrong people. Sorry buddy there is no escape. He right now has a crush on the sofa in our room. Usually comes back from his PS with a lighter wallet after burning of money in McDs, subway, ohri’s, satya sai tiffin centre and what not (mrinal at fault). We have even composed a song on him “mera ek dost he jiska naam he Phani”.

 

Mrinal – he is the mother of our household. He has got some really liking for mangoes. Spends most of his time with his guitar and plays naagin over and over again, trying to catch the attention of the female population in the opposite building. He managed one of the girls to take more than half an hour in drying clothes. I seriously don’t understand the secret of his X factor. He has a big database about all the religions and cults of this world. I don’t know how much of it sensible, but his intensity about knowledge spreading is so high that he took time out to explain what bible is all about to me.

 

Arun – we usually don’t see his weekend edition coz he runs away to his uncle’s place almost always. Supposedly he is teaching his cousin. This guy has got some nick in filth word diction. We are really fond of the moments when he gets into a bad words escapade. He has some allergy with water and rarely takes bath even after visiting the drug plants. Please come back Arun, Anshul is missing u a lot.

 

And ofcourse the sixth edge is me. More in the next post.

dvitiya varsh

A good start is half work done and all is well that ends well. Strangely nobody talks about what happens in the middle. After surviving the most violating series of tests i am suddenly reminded that its half time for my bitsian life. What is most amazing is that i have heard almost all bitsians say that any given sem is faster than the previous one. Even i affirm to this totally unscientific notion.

                Second year has been a mix of good and bad, complete joblessness and unscalable schedules, As and Cs(missed a D), the big chill and inedible mess food, chilly nights and the energy sapping hot afternoons, the foggy days, the cloudy evenings, the amazing oasis(headbanging, cave, KGs poetry sessions etc), BOSM(fooseball...), APOGEE, delhi trip, khetri, daily runs for mt classes, single room, sworn on by the supree who used the F word, running in the night with my lappy when it rained cats and dogs( elephants too), let there be light .... and much more. In all it was a totally different experience from the first year.

Things have passed. Half time as i said. And the young lad who came into this campus two years back finds himself more insane than ever. I feel damned to use this cliché but yes time does fly.

 1-1 was a time of showing thadi. A time, when the echo of my own id no. from seniors, used to put me up on some imaginary pedestal (because my id no started with zuk which fascinated people ...why the hell). The 1-1 CG card was a slap on the face which still echoes. I guess this is the story of half of the a7ites, the other half is a sad lot. Next year horrifies me of CDCs and i really want to join that sad lot. In the middle of sudden void in the schedule, i am forced  to write this completely arbit post. 1 month of survival and then the half time will be official. Looking forward to it.

Yeh Delhi he mere yaar

The dryness and dullness of APOGEE by the 4th day and the mess exploited tongues forced the secret seven( well there is neither anything secret about the seven nor did we go and solve secrets, it just sounds cool) to flee from this campus for a day. The question was where, and after much thinking, discussing, deliberating, pleading, we decided on the closest feasible destination. Delhi. The voyage started with the seven of us doing a disappearing act. Not more on this. Big brother is watching :P. It was 7 of us ... rather 6 n a half... Barbie, mojo, d2, cow, mcbhat(i would like to propose a new name for him...metro), me and of course the person who made the number non integral... pinky.

After some nerve racking minutes, we finally left pilani at around 3. The wait for a train in the midnight at a railway crossing in loharu was so childishly appealing. Then we got on to a really deserted route to delhi. And then we started with the ceremonial ghost story sessions featuring headless man, lady with totally white eyes, dejavu , dreams etc and the best being the one in which the lady ran alongside a car at 120kmph.

At around 5:45 the vehicle stopped at some dhaba. After a cup of tea our spirits were back in full throttle. From Gurgaon till the end of our destination, there was a series of songs murdered by us... starting from the “dinga dinga dinga dinga......” of rang de basanti. As this was my first trip to Delhi ( rather second, my mom told me that my first birthday was celebrated in Delhi... strange piece of trivia), i was really glad that i got to see the best parts of delhi at first.

Destination 1 was India Gate. It was morning 7 and the place looked so majestic. We werent content enough from taking pics. After some time when our stomach started sending signals to brains and so we went in search for food and reached Connaught place at some 8 30.

As it was too early, no shop had opened till then and we could do nothing but gaze at the closed doors of countless McDs, pizzahuts, dominoes, CCDs, subways, KFC, subway, baristas etc. That was when we decided to take a metro ride to kashmiri gate and grab something to eat. We reached that place and reached a McD outlet. Our mental state was similar to war refugees. But in the greed of eating i (anvi was more responsible) ended up wasting a chicken burger.... utterly outrageous... can’t forgive myself for that :P.

In the meanwhile we didn’t notice that psychological impact caused by the metro ride on rohit. He persuaded us hard to drive on the red metro line. But coz he is tall and big, his childish tantrums were given no notice. We took a ride back to Connaught place.

It was 9:45 and the shops were still closed. We decided to go to red fort. After going through the monument we sat down in one of the gardens inside. It was then that Barbie started flirting with ... u know what.... a lawn mower . After doing that for some 20 minutes and realising the futility of his efforts, we finally left red fort to fill our tummies ... again :).

We found a way through the roads of chandini chowk(delhi6) to reach parawathe vali gali (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gali_paranthe_walee). We went inside one of the shops and i was totally taken aback after looking at the menu. The varities of parawthe offered were unimaginable. We tasted 8 of them (paneer, rabdi, mirchi, mixed, gajar, poodina, papad and kharchin) followed by a big glass of lassi. The food was just amazing.

From there we left for Connaught place again. This time it was alive and active. We went inside the palika bazaar. We found people selling 250GB pendrives. There was another place which was giving out 3 tshirts for 100 bucks( Rs33.33 per tshirt). In the middle of this we won a bargaining fight for anvi. There was a weighing machine also and we found that anvi’s weight is half that of rohit :P. After this, KG joined us and we took the metro to go to rohini to reach the adventure and the joy on rohit’s face was radiating coz we had to travel on the red line. We reached rohini and had to wallk through some open land and around stinking waters to reach adventure island ( which was described by rikhsaw vaala as “chote bacho ke khelne ke jagah).

After taking the tickets, we went inside and went directly to an insanely scary ride (atleast for me,d2, Barbie and kg to some extent) called side winder. The craze of anvi towards this was too much. After her third trip over that there were speculations that anvi’s brain has taken a 180 degree turn inside and that she will start painting and will forget coding in C. In that place we also met one of the most impolite person that i have seen who refused to take our group pic(poor d2).

We left that place and rode back in the metro to reach CP. We took our cab and then KG directed us to heavenly hell. It was the Khan Market and we went in to a cafe to get chilled out. It was the BIG CHILL. We ordered a round of desserts. The prices were like a slap on the face( we took it delightfully...it costed us 100 bucks per head). What surprised us even more was the size of chocolate mudpie and the cheese cake that we ordered. It wasn’t big enough to even have a mouthful. But it was just too yummy. So much so, that the discussions in the drive from there to Gurgaon was totally based on that.

After burning holes in our pockets, there was a sudden realisation of the wickedness of the tongue. Barbie was especially disturbed by this. The fund of big chillu(the hole) by cow... the poem... Barbie calling chote bache harami... everything happened in this while. But the fundamental problem still remained... we were still hungry :). After dealing with our upset driver, we made our way to the malls in gurgaon and got split up for KFC and Pizza hut. After burning our pockets a bit more, we left gurgaon at some 11 for pilani. It was a really tiring job to keep atleast one person awake next to driver. With some brave acts from saransh, ajay and rohit the driver could be kept awake. This driver had a unique set of songs like any other driver. It had comments on the songs as interlude. With tired body and mind we finally reached pilani at 3oclock completing exactly 24 hours of maverickism. We had to do the appearing act this time. Finally the trip came to an end.

Thanks to a lovely weather, planless decisions and the wittiness of the secret seven which made 27 march 2009 a special day and the trip a no regrets trip.

Networking... Social networking

There were days when ‘orkut’ was the new buzzword. Suddenly people started asking whether i was in orkut or not. When i said i was not, they would make it a point to convince me that i am missing something important in life. After hearing this time and again i gave in to the temptation of finding out what this word had for me (initially i felt it was taken from mandarin). Although i was bogged down till then by the countless arguments of elders that internet is a haven of ‘dirt’.

When i made my account on orkut, i was under the able guidance of one of my happy go lucky friend, prabuddh , who scared the wits out of me when, in order to screw me, he added one of the girls from my coaching class as ‘friend’ in my account. I was really worried about the prospective consequences of declaring a girl(whom i never talked to) as a friend on web.
Then there was a phase of juvenile enthusiasm, of making a community, meant just for me and my friends. It was the birth of the bad boyz (hail all you Bad Boys!!!!).We, monkeys... running in a rat race... really got overboard with our community... and most of our recess discussions in school were dedicated to this... the teenage blood was at work and the innocence and fun that i derived from such trivial things really makes me miss my teenage.

I remember when one of my ‘interactions’ ( :P) with a junior, i figured out that people can have ‘networking’ as their hobby(initially i was impressed, thinking he was talking about computer networking, to be dawned about my ignorance of the usage of a term). It really amazed me how a thing so unproductive can feature in that list.
I agree that it is really a nice medium of keeping in touch with people and i myself have benefitted a lot by finding long lost friends on net. The thing is, these sites are social networking sites and not keep-in-touch sites. And so these come with value added services which can keep you occupied for hours together, only for you to find yourself growing grey and dumb.

A very significant important social/cultural shift that has happened lately, is that people are given an option of living two lives at the same time. One in which they are what they are and they cant change how people look at them. Then there is this virtual world, where one can manipulate their own image. Where everybody becomes the cool dude they always wanted to become. Those cool funky names that people keep on orkut.... or sudden escalation of interest in photography specially in the art of self portrait... or people using the ‘about me’ column to write in length about how complicated a creature they all are and use that space to display their command over English language . Hypocrisy has mutated from the time of jews to social networking sites.

And well i am no exception to this hypocrisy and myself have gone through all that i have criticised. But at times my conscience does prick me. Living virtual can never bring a real peace. It has now become a necessary evil. But then i guess i have bigger evils to deal with and this doesn’t need my efforts :P.

Bleeding Nephrons

Living in this college and having a decent standard of living created a bubble around me. A bubble of complacency which got a pinch in the winter vacations of December 2007.

                After surviving the gruelling round of my first set of comprees, with the hope of taking a break, i boarded the bus to my home. Little did i know that the pre planned visit to a hospital could shake me up.

                My mom was suffering from a stone in her kidney and a surgery for the removal of the same was scheduled in last week of December. It was to take place in Muljhibhai Patel Urological Hospital in Nadiad,Gujrat(considered one of the good ones for kidneys).

                Since  i am a fraud mallu( if you are encountering this term for the first time, it refers to all those people who have their native place in Kerala but are settled elsewhere) all my relatives are spread across the country and so it was gonna be my dad me and devaraj bhaiya( very good friend of ours) who were gonna take care of my mom( my granny was supposed to join later). It was on the Christmas morning (25^th dec) that we left for Nadiad . I was extremely relieved to find that the hospital was really clean. But that was just a consolation to much more that was to come later.

                The next day i got a feel of the magnitude of thing that we were gonna face as a family and it made me shiver. My mom was gonna be on the surgery table, and then my head flashed all the surgeries that i had seen on television ( by then i hadn’t seen house md). One day before the surgery we were asked to arrange for blood as a ‘precautionary’ measure. I was getting more and more and scared. My mom is O- but gladly we were able to arrange the blood from the red cross blood bank( devaraj bhaiya gave his blood as replacement).

                The surgery took place the next day. By God’s grace it all went well. I was relieved. But then came the challenging part. It was very very sad to see mummy in the post operative ward. She looked so sick and weak. That was really scary. My dad was the only person allowed in. And then i had to replace him there for some time so that he could take a bit of sleep. It was somewhere around 4 in the morning i guess. I sat next to her the rest of the night. Had never experienced anything like this before. Then I went to the railway station to receive my grandma. Finally we( me and dad) felt relieved.

                The day after that, everything was alright. My mom got her consciousness back. The surgery was without any complications and she was recovering properly.

                But the whole ordeal didn’t end here. After my mom was out of any kind of danger, i started observing my surroundings and found that the place was full of sick people.

                I was shocked to see the various kinds of diseases that people suffered with. There were young people with fatal conditions... old people with endless complicacies... it was a mayhem of kidney disorders.

                There was this one person whose one kidney was not working and the other kidney was shrinking. There were rooms full of people getting dialysis(blood clean up in normal language) done and delaying the final verdict of death. Wards full of patients waiting for their names to slide up on the kidney transplant list.  There were many more people i saw. I don’t remember what they were suffering from. But there was one case which i cant forget. It was a lady who was terminally sick. But she didn’t have enough money to continue with the treatment. And the hospital authorities asked her to leave the hospital and enrolled her name for aids given by NGOs.... there were lot of other patients.... and each and every one depicting misery in different forms and shapes.

I was shocked. It was the first time that i had ventured out of my ‘bubble’. Out, to a living nightmare of people. Where hopes were run by strands of irrationalism because rationality was cruel. In the midst of all these bleeding nephrons i suddenly felt small. Suddenly me, my problems, my aspiration and my circumstances looked microscopic when scaled up in front of these traumatised folks.

                Whenever i remember those days, it gives me jitters every single time. I will treasure this experience forever.

19

Although in relative terms, 19 is not a big figure but in absolute sense it is surely a big time. And this is the end of my final teen year. But somewhere i am still that teen. The rebellious in me is still a spark away from explosion. And suddenly this realisation of my expected maturity makes me feel a bit robbed.

                When i sit and write down this, my past flashes back. My home, my school,  my old friends... everything... it just makes me realise that i had no less than an awesome 19 years of my life till now. And the dullness of sorrows and pains are so miniscule on the colourful piece of my history, that i really wanna thank God for this favour.

                Even though my soul cries in rebellion to the reality that it is time for me to “grow up”, i have no option but to grow up. I have realised now that even my smallest action is so consequential in my life and in the life of others unlike how it was when i was younger.

                In the midst of all this economic jeopardy, my future, for the first time, looks like a struggle. But i love uncertainties. Its a nice getaway from boredom. And i think its the remnant teen in me which makes me enjoy my own plight.

                With totally uncertain days ahead, life looks challenging. But i know there is one person up there who would be looking down and smiling at me., like the way i would have smiled at a small kid struggling with his shoe lace and finding it the biggest problem of his life. This one reason forces me not to be worried about anything. And it reminds me of the first Bible verse which i learnt:

Psalm 23:1

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want”

Genetically "Informalz "

Genetically "Informalz "

A ray of light, screeched through the pipe

And woke me up to a nightmare nigh

My alarm failed, i woke up late

My job interview 5 minutes ahead

 

Chewed a gum, toothbrush was luxury

Combed my hair in pain and fury

Suit and tie would have taken long

Was comfortable in my tshirt and shorts

 

Rushed and hurried to reach that room

Saw nervous creatures, as if down with flu

The last call for my name screamed out

Expected a storm in this drought

 

The grey heads gaped in shock

‘twas too much for that flock

They stretched out their hand to check their pulse

Coz they found me in INFORMALZ!!!

Who am i part II

This is one question which has grappled scholars, philosophers, vetti (velle) people over the years. This really shows the importance of this question. What is more amazing is to know that we still don’t know definitely about our own self. If the question was biological, i think we have the answer to this question. But call it curiosity or anything else; we still wanna know more about our origin. Obviously scientists have got leads in some directions. But we still don’t wanna get convinced by the answer. Its not the mathematics of big bang which can satisfy the emotional question of who we are (there is a clear mismatch). I don’t know what others think... and am myself not so equipped to answer such questions. But i have my own theory (if u can call it that :P). The things that i see happening around me yells at me to believe that the presence of a supernatural is inevitable. I really love the lyrics of a very cute song :

 

Every tiny star

That twinkles in the night sky

Every drop of morning dew.               

Every spark of fire

Blazing in the furnace

Every captivating view

Every rainbow in the sky,         

Every pretty butter-fly

Tells the fascinating news to

Those who dare to hope   

And the message is

God still loves the world

 

 

Although this song doesn’t have anything in it to prove the existence of God but still, for me, the very simplicity and something else in it makes me feel that this world without God will be dry and hollow and impossible.

In this fight of theism versus atheism, it always so happens that we tend to defend one over the other by using better superlatives and it turns out to be a fight between adjectives, adverbs and illustrations.

There is no answer to this question which might satisfy different kinds of people all alike. There is another thought which comes to my mind often. Why is it necessary that we should be able to understand everything? May be our brains are not capable enough to answer all questions that come to us. You can’t make a monkey understand cosmic science... then why cant this same thing apply to us.

I know this post sounds very confusing. But frankly speaking, i find this question very simple. I guess  because i have stopped at an explanation to this, and i am so much awed by it, that i don’t feel like losing my peace that i have by living in that explanation. Sounds irrational, but i prefer peace.  

Who am i part I

Even after the superiority of the human race over all other living beings, it is still perplexed by one question time and again. “who am i"?
There are some reasons why you might troubled by such questions:

1. short term amnesia: ya ya this idea is a bit filmy but it explains the given condition especially in case of people like deva :P. the condition is very easy  to understand. In this the victim suddenly forgets everything and then ends up asking this question to himself- " mai kaun hu ?" :P. for people having this trouble, the best treatment is that they should carry their ID card or drivers license with them, and as soon as they get troubled by this question, they should take a big paper and their ID card and should start writing their own name as an imposition, till the body starts cursing the brain for popping up this question. And of course i ruled out tattooing as an option already.

2. Nothing else to ask oneself: For some reasons we often pop up questions which hav inconclusive answers for the sake of it coz, well, they can keep u engaged for a longer time and their answers actually don’t affect ur life at all. Hey such people actually don’t need an answer. Having an answer will only spoil a medium to run out of boredom.


3. People who found an answer: these are the people who found the answer some way or the other but are uncomfortable with too much of knowledge and so they keep popping these questions.

4. People who really need to know who they are: I really sympathise with u people :P. My next post... just for u.

The story of a swimmer( Michael Phelps) and an elephant( Bahujan Samaj Party)

Hey people i have not gone nuts. It’s just a satirical piece of text aimed at ... doing nothing.... i know irrespective of whatever i write, nothing is gonna change. Stll for the fun of it....

 

I know this is crazy times crazy but.... imagine. Suddenly one day Mr. Michael phelps suddenly makes up his mind to take up Indian nationality. This was after his manager(who is from Indian origin(say))  told him about the money and endorsments that abhinav bindra received when he won a single gold medal. Then it didn’t take him much time to do the math(for 8 gold) .

                He comes to India amidst a fervid croud. The very next day he is stormed by the Indian media. There is breaking news flashed in India TV “Michael Phelps pees before going to sleep”. The whole media goes lunatic. He is seen shooting an ad film for “fair and handsome”. The following day he gets an offer from big boss which he declines, citing claustrophobia. He is offered the post of “honorary fitness trainer” for the Indian cricket team. He is seen showing appearances in all possible reality shows. He agrees to be a judge alongside our maverick Mr. Siddhu in the next season of great Indian laughter challenge (of course along with a translator (the funny part is, after a participant used to tell a joke, translator used to translate it for him and after that he used to laugh, siddhu used to laugh all along the translation and beyond until phelps stopped laughing :P :P)). His ultimate moment of glory comes when he is asked to participate in some dance reality show along with his new girlfriend rakhi sawant. Basking on his popularity he accepts the offer made by BSP(Bahujan Samaj Party, Mayawati’s party) to stand against our former PM Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee from lucknow. Sadly he doesn’t win(coz he has lesser grey hairs). In all this, he forgot to dive into the pool for months. And by the time London Olympics comes, Indian swimmers can swim faster than him(of course that was an exaggeration) . He is booked by the cops for drug trafficking(a plot by some envious politician). He frees out on bail. Finally he takes a ticket to US. Buys an apartment in Memphis and announces his retirement from the world.

                Moral of the story: haathi(BSP’s symbol) ke daant khane ke aur, aur dikhane ke aur :P. And please don’t surf through the TV channels when you go home for vacations, coz it might inspire you to write junk like this.