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.