All in Good Jest

Punchline

2012-02-05T23:00:00.002+05:30

The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.

The Persistence of Hope

2012-01-29T21:40:00.005+05:30

In the longest Grand Slam final in Open Era tennis (probably ever as well), Novak Djokovic ended the almost 6 hour odyssey with a forehand shot from the middle of the court to his right and out of reach of Rafael Nadal's forehand.

That is not to say that the fight was as simple, though it certainly looked it after the 3rd set. Nadal had taken the first set 7-5, but Djokovic had then stormed through the next two sets, taking them 6-4 and then 6-2. The Spaniard seemed out of the game - tired, sweating, running to and fro - while the Serbian dictated the shots from the center of his baseline. Anyone who would have said that the match would go till a fifth set would have been considered blind with stupidity or with hope.

Yet that is exactly what happened. The turning point was the game in the fourth set, when Nadal was down forty love on his own serve and a break point to the Serb would have given the world number one a chance to serve for the match. But against all odds, all statistics, against all reason and rational belief, Rafael Nadal thundered serve after serve and rally after rally to win the game, and went on to win the set. As a friend remarked, he seemed to be telling us all: "Alright boys, warm up's over. Let's start playing some tennis".

(When Djokovic was down in the game that led to the fourth set's tie break, you could see the weariness in him as he let the last shot go, saving his energy for the tie break.)

And even in the fifth set, as the match passed the five hour time and into 30 plus shot rallies that left players gasping for breath on the floor, Nadal, while on the run from the far corner of the court hammered a cross court winner that just seemed surreal. As the commentator put it, "that shot at 164kph was the fastest we've seen, and he was going backwards when he hit it"

It was all to no avail, sadly, as Djokovic outlasted - even he would admit that he didn't really "defeat" - Nadal, plunging to his knees and tearing off his tee shirt in joy and relief. But this belies the accomplishment that Nadal achieved that night. In the midst of players who have honed their art to perfection - and there is no denying that there is a certain grace, fluidity, and even sagacity to the way Federer, Djokovic, and Murray all play - Nadal succeeds to trump all that with pure grit. He never gives up, never retreats, no matter what the scoreboard says, no matter what odds the bookies dole out. In a word, he inspires. In his grinding of teeth and grunting of chest, we are reminded to hope regardless of how hopeless things seem, that for anyone and all of us, the match is never over till the last point is played.

After the semi finals against Federer, Nadal was briefly interviewed on court about the rivalry between him and Federer. In three days, the age of Federer-Nadal has ended. The era of Nadal-Djokovic has begun.

Olfactory

2012-01-08T00:53:00.001+05:30

The smell of cigarette smoke from the pub clung on to his clothes, like the memory of the past refusing to let go. He let the windows down to allow the wind rush in and wash the stained smell out of his head and his car.

The night air was cool, it had rained the previous morning and that had taken the edge off the cold north Indian winter. It no longer cut like a blade but flowed like a river over his face.

He suddenly realised that the smokey afterglow in the moist laden winter air smelled like those late nights he had spent back home, driving through streets he had no names for but knew like they were family, with people whose names he remembered but had no idea of where they were or what they would be doing at this moment.

He drove on, homeward bound through the young night.

Having promised his father that he would be home by a little after midnight, he passed through the gate of his colony at ten past twelve. But he drove past the turn that led to his house. What the hell. His promise could wait a few more minutes. It was such a lovely night right now.

He could still smell her in his head. Incense candles mixed in with those dry petals which his mother used to freshen up their living room. A chance missed, no doubt. But he had grown tired of all that. Or maybe too old for it. He smirked at his own self flagellation.

The structures of the colony drifted by the open windows of his car in second gear, his foot off the gas pedal. Grotesquely large bungalows with domes floated by his peripheral vision like icebergs warning him of danger. He guided his car almost drearily through trees sprung out in the middle of the road, swaying left and right in a dance of life and, well, a huge hole in his pocket.

Suddenly a whiff of something sweet ran through his windows. What was it? Jacaranda? No, not at this time of the year. Wondering what it was, he backed his car up to where he'd smelt it. Slowly now, there it was. Dew, he realised. Beautiful in its simplicity and clarity and freshness. The moist air reminded him more and more of home.

He let the smell of cold nights and the memories of early mornings overtake him. Adolescence in Alipore, the smell of anticipation with a tinge of fear as they broke the law. Nonchalance in North Campus and the smell of weeks spent in listless banter. Business in Bilekahalli as discussions on pricing strategies filled the whiteboard on his wall and the smell of that warm, far too sweet chai filled his head.

His circle of the colony complete, he parked his car in the usual spot. Stretching out to the cold Delhi winter, he took in one last breath before he stepped inside.

Paraphernalia

2012-01-01T03:51:00.008+05:30

The table calendar was useless now, he thought, as he undressed after a good long evening celebrating the advent of another year and got ready for bed. It had been gifted to him by a senior from college, a calendar depicting various aspects of a place that had once seemed so alien but now represented a time which he longed for as if it were home. The thought of this made him smile and he picked up the 5x7 inch calendar, paraphernalia purchased for probably no more than a hundred rupees at the college's cooperative store, and flipped to January and leafed through each month, every memory, of the year that had just passed.

It always ends, he felt. Here was a picture of students sitting on the lawns, there was a picture of the college's founder, each month's picture with a caption to depict the mood of the image. How foolish, he chided himself, to rummage through the past for traces of glory like a homeless man rummages through garbage for scraps of food. He decided that he would throw the calendar out the first thing in the morning.

At December, the month that was barely four hours over, the caption read Solitude. How apt, he thought, that after all those pages, those captions of hope, sunshine, and dreams, came one so brutally honest and real. The last mile, walked alone. Winter in Delhi. Cold, desolate, empty. He turned the last page.

But only it hadn't been the last page, there was one more. Maybe the printers had calculated that adding one more page would be of no incremental cost. Whatever the case had been, the true final page lay before him, the image of the clock tower and two students sitting in front of the auditorium. The month, January of 2012. The caption a single word.

Friendship.

The calendar in his hand almost seemed to smirk with an air of condescension between his fingers, vindicated in it's extended usefulness for one more month. He placed it slowly back on the table beside his bed, in its rightful place - a testament to remind him that beyond the end, new beginnings always prevailed. That solitude is necessary, but it is not tantamount to isolation, as the companions sleeping beside him and in the next room, and even several blocks and pin codes away, served to remind him. Friendship would always last beyond the year. And the year after that. We are alone in choosing the paths that we must tread, but our friends and family will always walk beside us, outlasting even the bleakest winters and the coldest mists.

Happy New Year.

On Ragland Road

2011-12-30T17:39:00.003+05:30

On Raglan Road of an autumn day
I saw her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare
That I might one day rue
I saw the danger and I passed
Along the enchanted way
And said let grief be a fallen leaf
At the dawning of the day

On Grafton Street in November
We tripped lightly along the ledge
Of a deep ravine where can be seen
The worth of passion's pledge
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts
And I not making hay
Oh I loved too much and by such by such
Is happiness thrown away

I gave her gifts of the mind
I gave her the secret signs
Known to the artists who have known
The true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint I did not stint
I gave her poems to say
With her own name there
And her own dark hair
Like clouds over fields of May

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet
I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had loved not as I should
A creature made of clay
When the angel woos the clay
He'll lose his wings at the dawn of day

2011-12-27T01:14:00.000+05:30

"Us against the world, deal?"

"Deal. FREAK!"

He could hear the sadness in her voice subsiding as her jocular words quivered through the phone in the cold air. How long, he wondered, before she would break down and call him again.

"Ok. I have to go now. But I'm right here ok? I'll be up in any case. Bloody project is never ending."

"Don't worry about it. I'm sure you'll do awesome."

"Yeah. I hope so too. Gnight k. Love you."

"Love you."

Facebook

2011-12-26T11:00:00.001+05:30

Him: Why are airports so depressing
Me: Because if you pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars, then airports are where wishes collide

100 years

2011-12-14T13:33:00.000+05:30

"Delhi was once a paradise,
Where Love held sway and reigned;
But its charm lies ravished now
And only ruins remain."

Red Pill

2011-11-22T06:49:00.000+05:30

There is safety in the herd, for sure. There is societal appreciation, career progression, lineage building, and weekend trips to the spa. But all along I keep on asking myself, (and here I quote J.J. Abrams in his reboot of the Star Trek franchise) "do you feel like you were meant for something better? "

It all boils down to a choice. We choose to regret not having tried something out for the security net of all of the above, and then some. Happiness versus Stability. It's funny how I always seem to find the two mutually exclusive. There is nothing wrong with them co-existing. "Contentment is not always stagnation", I hear myself advising a friend.

But choices must be made. And as has been said earlier, there are no wrong decisions. Or right ones for that matter. There are only choices. And a choice that closes a door always opens a hatch.

I made my choice. I elected to stray. Maybe it'll work out, maybe it won't. And even if it does, that's just passing through the gate: the going thereafter will only get tougher. No matter, it was never about it being easy. It is not important what choice you make, whether the road is long and hard, or whether you don't even succeed. So long as you are doing it for yourself and not what others think of you.

Am I scared? More than I've ever been. The unknown is a cold, terrifying place I've never ventured into. 17 years of continuous education had laid a stable secure life for me. With one decision, I'm plunging it all, myself notwithstanding, into the abyss.

But if not now, then never. Here's to one helluva year.

Momentary Grasp of Treason

2011-10-17T23:29:00.000+05:30

The iPhone 4S has sold 4 million units in 3 days. If you want to put that in perspective: that means it’s outsold its predecessor, the iPhone 4, within the first weekend. Twice over. Arch rival Samsung has - since April, mind you - sold 10 million units of its flagship Galaxy SII – touted as the best smartphone on the market (and with good reason, Tim Cook himself announced the iPhone 4S as only the best “iPhone”)

I’m not much of an Apple fan, sure they make beautiful products, but they also cost an arm and a leg. But Steve, wherever you are – up There or whatever reincarnation you wound up in, seeing that you were Buddhist – take a bow.

This comes just a few weeks after an AC Nielsen report released stating that 56% of all smartphone devices purchased in the last three months were Android. Well the reason for that is clear now – everyone was waiting for the new iPhone.

Now to get back to my senses.

Samsung will release the new Galaxy Nexus in a day. RIM just announced that it will allow some of its hitherto paid-for premium Blackberry apps to be downloaded free of cost. Nokia just launched the N9 with the latest edition of the MeeGo OS (and boy, does it look sweet). Motorola has their Atrix 2 all ready to rumble.
Lets rock and roll.

Once Around the Sun

2011-10-14T01:39:00.002+05:30

John Mayer and Regina Spektor play out blues and jazz respectively as the city races past at one in the morning, Indian Standard Time: the old city centre, the rivers that run by the great rural conurbation, past walkovers and flyovers and underpasses and great shiny metro stations; they all blur as the guitars solo and the pianos crescendo.

To be twenty five and young and old.

"There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace."

Think Different

2011-10-06T09:27:00.002+05:30

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

It Goes On

2011-09-20T23:45:00.003+05:30

Wading through past memories with technology as my aide
I'm caught in a current of history leaving sorrow in it's wake
And daunted by the future, the great beyond and all unseen
"It goes on", I softly whisper, and onwards I proceed

Bunk

2011-09-12T10:12:00.005+05:30

I took a day off today. My first in about six months. I called in sick. It was a lie.

I'm still working from home though. There's too much that needs to be done. But working from home for a change is welcome. I won't go into analyzing if my efficiency has increased, but my happiness certainly upped itself a few notches. That has to count for something, even these days. The good autumn weather outside my lovely balcony does not detract from that. Office sounds get to you after awhile. Phone ringing, printer running, chai-boy calling, sales-target chasing, gyaan dispensing sounds. Now I have birds chirping in the tree just outside my window, construction (hammer-saw-generator) sounds from the colony below, a touch of traffic here and there, and an empty large space feeling that can only come from a place called home.

Precipitation

2011-08-26T01:59:00.004+05:30

He was awoken by the sound of thunder, and then the constant thrashing of water striking his windowpanes at terminal velocity kept him awake. He turned his head towards his side as he reached for his phone which he always kept nearby to tell him the time and then flopped back down on his pillow and sighed. It had been several days since he had slept well, he had always been a light sleeper, but of late there had been something nagging him, something that he couldn't quite put a finger on.

He got up to take stock of the weather outside, stepping out onto his balcony to face the spray of rain bouncing off the parapet. From his vantage point he could see far into the distance and marveled as the lightning raced the rain towards the ground in the distant horizon. Trees were clinging on for dear life as they were thrashed about in the wind and pieces of garbage were being driven down the streets below like tumbleweed in the old Western movies his father loved.

There was not a soul to be seen awake. Mother nature had reclaimed the city, if only for a little while. It made him think of how easy it was for things to regress with the slightest loosening of order. At the whim of a butterfly in China, a thunderstorm could brew in his backyard. And not just nature. People too are not so different from ancestors past. We often talk about empathy and charity and hold ourselves with high ideals and a sense of right, but at the end of it all, when the chips are down, everyone thinks for themselves. An Animal Kingdom veiled only by concrete and steel and complex textiles. We live in a Savage Civilization, at best. Where we mask our hunters instincts with words and fancy cars. And we keep spiraling downwards.

Maybe there is hope somewhere in all this. A shimmer of light off the water covering the world around him whenever plasma united earth and sky for a moment. Silver linings, lights at the end of the tunnel, these are all things we were taught to believe in.

He shrugged to himself as the night wore on, and decided to go back to bed to try and sleep.

2011-07-21T07:27:00.000+05:30

"People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that's bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they're afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it. That's what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you're letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain."

2011-05-10T10:00:00.004+05:30

Summer in the Garden. It's been almost four years since I first came here, just over two since I've left. I look back with wonder at the way time has passed and all that has transpired since the first time I came to this city. Two years in one place is a long enough time. Four years away from a moment even more so.

2011-04-09T02:56:00.000+05:30

"I became a soldier, so that my son could be a farmer, so that his son could become a poet"

Any Dream Will Do

2011-02-22T13:27:00.001+05:30

I closed my eyes, drew back the curtain
To see for certain what I thought I knew
Far far away, someone was weeping
But the world was sleeping
Any dream will do

May I return to the beginning
The light is dimming, and the dream is too
The world and I, we are still waiting
Still hesitating
Any dream will do

Year's End

2010-12-31T01:06:00.008+05:30

He could barely see a thousand metres beyond the glass of his office cabin that kept out the cold wintry fog of the nation’s capital and even then, everything within sight was drained of colour; the light from the sun could not or would not break through the haze and our nearest star was reduced to a glowing disc in the background. Swivelling around to face the fourth floor of the office building where he worked, the overcoat he wore for his daily commute through the icy cold hanging across the back of his chair, he wondered if there were any chances of rain tonight, for it had been drizzling of late and he had an open air social gathering to attend to honour the festivities of the season. The year was almost over and this was the first time he would be greeting the new one so far from either of the two places he called home. It was an event he looked towards not without a touch of melancholy, for it seemed that smog had replaced the clouds that ran amok through his ancestral house and glass and steel buildings were now his abode when once he resided in a city of palaces. He was a long way from home indeed.

The year was almost done with. It had been better than the last, he noted to himself, even though some of the bad experiences from that year had spilled over into the next. An unavoidable occurrence, given the nature of those bad experiences, and something which was very much like the taste of bile that lingers on your palate long after you’ve spat it out or swallowed it back down. It occurred to him erratically that the word bile and the word melancholy were once upon a time linked, an anachronistic concept that sadness was caused by the liquids of the liver. It did not matter. The year and the last (the two seemed a pair now) were both history, the events that occurred in them would no doubt be remembered internally, but he would invoke them externally only much later on as a story or perhaps a lesson to one of his offspring, the boy it would be, as he would reprimand him, starting with the words “when I was a younger man…”

Seven hundred and thirty days.

By now it was six in the evening, and whatever few employees had turned up to work on the last day of the year which just happened to be a Friday as well and hence the perfect time to take leave and cash in on an extended weekend off had now also vanished. But he stayed back for a little while longer, standing up to don his coat and turning to the world outside – the last leg of the city’s metro line under construction, the massive malls that sprung up every eighteen months or so, each trying to outdo its predecessors, the vast multitude of the great Indian middle class tearing up the highways and the by lanes of the national capital region in their swanky cars and tailored suits, all of them no doubt heading for some memorable event to reign in the new year. All of them also, no doubt, had their own stories to tell, but for now, he thought as he finally packed up his bag and headed towards the lift, he would have to make do with his own.

There would be prologues of course, and prequels to those, just as there would be sequels and spin-offs to make up the years that would follow. All that would go into writing the grand story of his life. But for now, the New Year beckoned to him, replete with challenges to conquer and dreams to chase, lands to travel to and people to meet. When the time would arrive, it may come to pass that the world would fade quietly; he did not know and mostly did not want to, you could say that he did not care. This was the way the year would end; not with a whimper but a bang, and with a bang would start the new.

Of Little Princes

2010-12-21T18:26:00.002+05:30

"I am very fond of sunsets. Come, let us go look at a sunset now."

"But we must wait," I said.

"Wait? For what?"

"For the sunset. We must wait until it is time."

At first you seemed to be very much surprised. And then you laughed to yourself. You said to me: "I am always thinking that I am at home!"

Christmas Lights

2010-12-06T23:12:00.009+05:30

Ever once in a while, a song comes along that just hits all the right notes. Maybe this is just my opinion. Maybe the song will burn out and be forgotten soon. But damn, that piano riff, Chris Martin's vocals, Will Champion's 3x3 kicking in midway, all make for one of the most bittersweet tunes to hit me in a long, long time. It's not really a Christmas song in the strictest sense of the term - it's not a hymn and it's got no traces of Christianity to it. But by all that's holy, it's got humanity. And in the process, a bit of godliness as well.

I believe Elvis lives.

From one mortal soul to another

2010-11-22T12:43:00.001+05:30

The celebrations end, the lights are taken down,
and cycles circle on in the midst of a wintry town.
For a moment we relive our times of yesteryear
through memories of innocence and smiles of good cheer.
And before we carry on losing the poetry of the earth,
we raise a toast to history, our pitchers filled with mirth.

The Maker

2010-11-21T15:55:00.007+05:30

Oh, oh deep water,
Black and cold like the night
I stand with arms wide open
I've run a twisted line
I'm a stranger in the eyes of the Maker

I could not see for the fog in my eyes
I could not feel for the fear in my life
From across the great divide
In the distance I saw a light
Of Jean Baptiste walking to me with the Maker

My body is bent and broken
By long and dangerous sleep
I can't work the fields of Abraham
And turn my head away
I'm not a stranger in the hands of the Maker

Brother John, have you seen the homeless daughters
Standing there with broken wings
I have seen the flaming swords there over east of eden
Burning in the eyes of the Maker

Punchline 2

2010-11-09T22:25:00.002+05:30

We humans are funny creatures. Despite our affinity for positive emotion, all our empathy and happiness permeating through the pores of our oldest art and our newest social networks, we thrive off the negative. It is not imagination that fuels our economies, but greed. Love does not keep our houses warm, pride does. And when we need to lift ourselves up when all else has failed, it is not hope, but fear that gives us wings.

The Social Network

2010-11-06T01:09:00.007+05:30

To answer the first question, is the movie of the year? So far, yes. Does it deserve an Academy Award? Well we’ve still got just under two months left before the window to the 83rd Oscars closes, but yes, I for one would put my money on it over films like Inception and How to Train Your Dragon, the former being more of an exercise in logical reasoning than a movie and they aren’t really going to award the best picture to an animated film just yet.

TSN is incredibly fast. It’s like learning how to speed code within the span of a few hours. The characters speak at an amazingly annoying fast pace and action cuts between two ‘presents’ and past so quickly that you feel like you’re sifting through a Facebook album filled with pictures of Mark’s life from college till now. And for a movie essentially about a bunch of nerds duking it out over the internet, college journals, through emails and across deposition meetings, it’s extremely riveting. Most of what’s depicted about Zuckerburg’s character in the movie is supposedly false, so I won't get into details about whether his character is in the right or not - I’m sure Hollywood has lionized and demonized to their heart’s content. But all in all, despite facts, it’s still got a great script and some tight directing.

But what really struck me were the implications of a single line spoken by Justin Timerblake’s character, the founder of Napster, Sean Parker.

“We lived in farms, then we lived in cities, and now we’re going to live on the Internet”

That’s why it’s a must watch movie. Because, if nothing else, it’s a sign of things to come. Computers changed the way we work and play, but the internet has fundamentally changed the way we live. Forbes recently published its second list of “68 people out of the 6.8 billion who matter”. On it, Mark Zuckerburg was ranked the 40th most powerful man in the world. He’s 26 years old. And every single person on that list this side of 44 years of age has gotten on it through the internet.

[SPOILER ALERT]

The movie ends with Zuckerburg 'adding' as a friend on Facebook one of the junior associates of the law firm who had been sitting in on one of the depositions. He then proceeds to stare at the screen, constantly refreshing the page, to see if she accepts or rejects his request. And it strikes a chord because after the lights go off and everyone leaves the party or the office, that's the importance we actually do attach to something as trivial as a social networking site called Facebook.

Errata Edit: So he didn't add the lawyer girl but his ex-girlfriend at the end of the movie. The point remains the same, even if the form doesn't.

From Seth's Blog

2010-10-07T09:47:00.002+05:30

Risking the appearance of weakness takes strength. And the market knows it.

Maurice Nagar

2010-09-25T01:30:00.001+05:30

We lit a candle and said a prayer
Left wax behind where once we were
The light may fade, to dust return
But that within will always burn

Second Hand News

2010-09-24T00:33:00.004+05:30

I was recently chatting with an old friend who'd just finished her internship and had taken a small break to go home for a while. I'd asked her if she had enjoyed working in the role she'd chosen when she replied saying that it had been a great learning experience and awesome fun with brilliant people and all that, but not something she'd want to do for the rest of her life. That got me thinking, because I've known some pretty smart people who, despite their flair for success and their addiction to excelling, rarely know what they really want to do in the long term. I replied to her emphatically, saying:

"There is very little in life we do now that we want to do for the rest of it."

Granted, this isn’t path breaking ideology here. I’ve heard this argument enough times and more at various stages of my life and in different forms. But there is that oft quoted difference between knowing the path and walking it. And discovering it on your own - discovering the exact path, finding it with your own eyes - is really different from asking someone for directions and walking towards where they point their finger. It goes something like this.

You’re at one edge of a clearing with tall grass in the woods and you have to get to a certain point on the other side, so you ask someone for directions. He/She (let's not be sexist) points to a particular tree amongst all the others at the other end of the clearing and you walk towards it. There could be a path across the clearing but you can see the tree anyway so why bother? But then imagine that while moving towards the tree, a sudden gust of wind clears the foliage in front of you for an instant and you catch sight of a dirt track for ever so brief a moment.

Now you know that there’s a path. You’re still walking towards the tree, but you know there’s a path even though you’re not walking exactly on it. Only now that you know there’s a path, and others have used it to get to exactly where you can see yourself arriving at, you don’t really want to find it because you know that you’re going to end up at the place where you wanted to be anyway (or at least you believe that you will).

So you’re like, fine, I’m sure I’ll get there my own way. And you build this ego around yourself saying that you’ll make your own path and don’t have to follow anyone. By now you’ve gotten about halfway from where you started when there’s another gust of wind, and you suddenly see that the path you’ve been following has been the path everyone else has been talking about all this while. The thing is, it’s still your path, because you followed it out of your own volition and not simply because it was there or someone pointed it out to you. But it’s everyone else’s path as well.

And in some strange way, you realise that it’s not about being unique or leaving your own trail or anything like that. That doesn’t even matter. It doesn’t even matter where you’re going. Everyone else is just as lost but heading in some general direction, just as you are. There aren’t many people with a plan. And even for the few that do have them, there are always variables in life. Things thrown our way, hands dealt to us that just don’t seem fair. And even if there isn’t, nothing in life is really certain.

What does matter is that when the breeze dies down and the path that was so clear for just an instant disappears again, and for a minute you lose track of the tree that was pointed out to you at the beginning amongst all the others, you can’t just stop and wait for another breeze to blow. You have to take a leap of faith and take a small step forward instead.

Induction

2010-09-18T02:11:00.003+05:30

Nicolas Cage has acted in better movies. His character in the 2007 movie, Next, can see two minutes ahead into the future. Here's some simple logic (or so it seems to me) as to why this premise is flawed.

Consider hero at three different points in time. 0 (present), +2 (2 minutes into the future), and +4 (4 minutes into the future). At +2 point in time, he will know what happens to him at +4 point in time. But at 0 point in time, he will know what he knows at +2 point in time. Ergo, he knows what will happen at +4 point in time as well, and hence, by the principle of mathematical induction, he will know what happens at a future point, say +6 point in time, and so on, ad infinitum.

I'm not saying that the movie is bad, heck I haven't seen it yet. It's just that it doesn't make sense to define it by saying that it'll be limited to only two minutes into the future. Sure, you can poke holes in this argument and say that maybe he sees what happens two minutes ahead and not what he sees two minutes ahead. But then that's just semantics.

Fine. I'll admit it. This was more an exercise in banter than an actual test of reason. But the subject matter doesn't really inspire, so I consider myself absolved.

When work gets to you,

2010-09-09T17:38:00.001+05:30

stand up and scream,

"screw you guys, I'm going home"

...not.

Also, I wish life had an 'eject' button sometimes. Something that goes like this.

Oneiros

2010-08-30T23:54:00.001+05:30

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I die before I wake
I pray for God my soul to take

2010-08-23T23:52:00.005+05:30

I used to think it funny when people would offer apologies when someone you're close to passes away. "I'm sorry for your loss" is such a cliche. Why would you even want to apologise? It's not your goddamn fault. If it was, the last thing I would want to do is listen to what you have to say.

A year ago someone very close to me lost his father. Despite knowing that I had nothing to do about it, I apologised for his loss. I was lost for words. I didn't know what to say, so I resorted to the old cliche. "I'm sorry to hear that". Today afternoon, another person I've known for a very long time lost her mother. Even though I don't know her too well (she's more of a friend of a friend) I sent her a message saying I was sorry to hear about her loss.

The reason we apologise, the reason we say we're sorry, is because there is no alternative. I'm sad to hear about your loss? You're not sad. You're sad for me but you're not sad yourself. And any variation in degree of the word just doesn't cut it. We cannot possibly empathise with a person who's lost a loved one. So we apologise at our inability to do so. We show sympathy and verbalise our emotions by using the five letter word. We're sorry because there really is nothing, despite all our technology and our power to move mountains, to explore distant planets, to split atoms and reclaim the land from the sea, that allows us to lessen the burden of grief from a fellow human being.

Arithmetic Progression

2010-08-17T23:50:00.006+05:30

The full force of the North Indian monsoon hit me in the face like a ton of bricks while I was doing 60 on a bike heading East on NH 28 towards a small town called Motihari in Northern Bihar. My companion in front of me bore the brunt of the onslaught though, but he manoeuvred the two-wheeler onto the front lawn of a small school that lay just beside the highway without any hint of grievance. We ducked under cover of a classroom filled with bags of produce and otherwise just one wooden table in front of the blackboard of the class and five plastic chairs, three of which were occupied by three elderly gents engaged in a relaxed discussing in the local language of Bhojpuri, a language I had absolutely no grasp over. My fellow motorist, a sales representative who I was exploring the rural towns with, and I sat ourselves down on the two empty chairs and looked out through the windows of the pink walled room at the first heavy rains of the season, losing our trains of thought in the spray of fresh water and the smell of evaporating rain on dry earth.

Exactly three years ago to the day, and only within a few hours of the time, I had been prancing about on the beaches of Mahabalipuram just off the East Coast road in the state of Tamil Nadu with an assortment of friends celebrating the completion of our first set of exams at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore. Earlier that day we had scrabbled across a rocky outcrop that stuck far out into the sea (such that if you stood facing eastward from the tip, you would have over 180 degrees of sea on the horizon) and popped open a few cans of beer. We later hit the sands and the surf with a football we’d found vacillating on the waves between the beach and the water. Then as the evening had drawn to a close and we had dried and changed up for the last leg of the trip (to Pondicherry, no less, where copious amounts of alcohol and an invitation to Auroville awaited us) the rain threatened to drench us once again with a sudden downpour out of the grey evening sky. Barefoot, with shoes and sandals in our hands, we had bolted across sand littered with splinters and shells of boats and animals long gone, tippy-toeing as much as possible so as to avoid injury, intermittently stopping for refuge underneath the shacks that lined the beach till we got to our taxi and rode off.

Thirteen days ago, I had boarded the Danapur Express from the Howrah Station just north of the city of Kolkata to head towards the city of Patna. I had marvelled, while I towed my luggage through the narrow aisles of the train compartment, at the fact that I had once said goodbye to it all on that very same platform over half a decade ago. Then, I had set out for a different journey and a different ending, a different adventure altogether, to the one I was embarking upon now. In six years’ time I would have had my fair share of goodbyes and hellos, fallen in love twice and lost out both times, and made enemies and friends who I would keep for a lifetime, and yet some things would always feel the same. Train stations, airports, bus stops. In the end, they all serve the same purpose. My mind had wandered then, as I pulled back the seat on the bottom berth of seat number 23 and plopped down on it, to my own memories of each; a tight embrace and a whisper in the ear before a flight home, a cup of chai and a conversation while waiting for an inter-state bus, a slight nod trying not to show too much joy welcoming me back, a text message apologizing for the hurried goodbye in order to catch the first flight to work. The train had lurched forward while I had still been stuck in rewind, but as it did, I smiled to myself at the irony of the situation, because it seemed just then that sometimes, in order to move forward, you had to take a few steps back.

Just in case life only happens once,

2010-08-10T23:39:00.005+05:30

you should smoke some more. Sure, I know about all the side effects but... well, I don't really have an argument against quitting. I could go and say that "I want to die at least as much as I want to live" or spew some other nihilistic bullshit. But I can't use logic to defend myself, so I will quote precedence.

If you really, really, think about it, there are quite a few things in life we do that aren't entirely logical.

Anyway who the fuck cares. I wrote this cause I came across a good phrase and it made me want to light up. I didn't come here to start a debate.

Peace and goodnight Patna.

Of Inception in general and Ideas in particular

2010-07-19T09:59:00.001+05:30

First of all, see the movie first.

Christopher Nolan is one of the brightest visionaries out there right now. I say visionaries and not filmmaker because I don't think that his movies capture the truest essence of what he is trying to say. And I say this not because he doesn't have great ideas, but because the medium of films lack that final dimension with which he can portray them. A poor worksman blames his tools, but you can't build a space shuttle with all the slave labour in the world if you have only bricks to work with.

What Inception does, and what many people will fail to realise, is challenge the viewer. It takes them out of the passive and makes them think, rehash scenes in the movie, different alternatives, other possibilities, all sorts of explanations. That's not to say that the plot is akin to the plot of The Matrix sequels. Anyone who's paying enough attention will understand what's going on. But Nolan, like always, doesn't deliver because his movies put you in a place where you want to be, but because his stories and ideas nudge you into spaces where you are least comfortable.

I won't dive deeply into the plot and the twists and the few weaknesses I felt were present the movie. But when I left the hall, I walked back in a trance like state. I walked a little faster while searching for a ride home. I picked up an extra cigarette and smoked it a little harder. I sweated a bit more because my brain wouldn't sit still. All the while wondering about what I'd just seen. Loosely, the film is about dreaming and different stages of it and how you dive in along with the protagonist into the subconcious before pulling he pulls himself and the viewer back out. I won't call it a great film, but Nolan's brilliance comes through in delivering one little detail that so many others have tried and few have accomplished. Think about 12 Monkeys, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Gattaca, and you get a sense of that feeling I'm trying to convey. When the credits roll up, you won't stand up and applaud the way you did for The Dark Knight, you won't leave with a sense of absolution and triumph. But you aren't supposed to feel those things; those come from movies that only tell you stories. When you leave the hall after Inception, you feel like you've dived into, and woken up from, one helluva crazy dream.

Every Grain of Sand

2010-05-29T09:58:00.001+05:30

In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need
When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed
There's a dying voice within me reaching out somewhere
Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair.

Don't have the inclination to look back on any mistake
Like Cain, I now behold this chain of events that I must break
In the fury of the moment I can see the master's hand
In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand.

Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear
Like criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer
The sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way
To ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay.

I gaze into the doorway of temptation's angry flame
And every time I pass that way I always hear my name
Then onward in my journey I come to understand
That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand.

I have gone from rags to riches in the sorrow of the night
In the violence of a summer's dream, in the chill of a wintry light
In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space
In the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face.

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, other time it's only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.

Black WIdow

2010-05-07T19:27:00.002+05:30

Firrsht Day, Firrsht Show. Thank you, Stan Lee, Jon Favreau, Emily Blunt (for not showing up) and whoever else I may have missed, for bringing everything together for this.

Ryan Renolds, you're a tool.

Get your geek on

2010-04-26T23:52:00.008+05:30

Given the spate of Android phones, 4G Apple iPhone leaks, and even laptop and PC manufacturer Dell entering the booming smartphone market (with the Windows 7 Phone OS, to boot) you'd think that the old guard would get wise to the act and come up with something better.

Yes, I'm talking about Nokia and Research In Motion (RIM). The former, it is safe to assume, will always have an edge in the lower end of the market and can, presumably, rest easy. One would think that's exactly what they're doing; what with the flop of the n97 and the x6 (the n900 has found a few takers with it's Maemo OS, but is still far too hefty), and the n8 is said to be riddled with speed issues even before it has been released - this comes with the much awaited third generation of Nokia's Symbian OS.

Research In Motion's (RIM) WES 2010 was expected to throw up a host of new generation phones. The Ontario based company has weathered the surge of rival smartphones since 2007 very well - managing to slightly increase it's share of the market and is currently hovering at about 20%. (The iPhone essentially ate away Microsoft's piece of the pie) With the Android OS now gaining popularity and seeing exponential growth in applications (and a v2.2 on the way), RIM was expected to launch a new breed of smartphone at it's annual conference. Fans and users - this author included - wildly speculated that there would be a new breed of Blackberry that would have a touchscreen and a landscape slide out qwerty keypad. Alas, this was not to be. Two products have been announced. The Pearl 3G is a poor man's 9700 and the Bold 9650 is a CDMA version of the same.

That being said, it is true that RIM had truly outdone themselves with the Bold 9700. There really is nothing much more they can pack onto a phone; nothing business related, anyway. In any case, the conference is only halfway through. While I will be waiting to see if there are any other new phones announced - which is very unlikely - I'm pretty sure that I will be joining the fray of Android toting nerds within, oh say, a month.

on failures, letting down friends, being let down, and misery in general

2010-04-23T20:44:00.003+05:30

Shit happens. Walk on.

Adventures

2010-04-08T14:38:00.002+05:30

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."

– Helen Keller

Oh and
http://xkcd.com/308/

Otherside

2010-04-07T02:48:00.002+05:30

How long how long will I slide
Separate my side I don’t
I don’t believe it’s bad
Slit my throat
It’s all I ever

I heard your voice through a photograph
I thought it up it brought up the past
Once you know you can never go back
I’ve got to take it on the otherside

Centuries are what it meant to me
A cemetery where I marry the sea
Stranger things could never change my mind
I’ve got to take it on the otherside
Take it on the otherside
Take it on
Take it on

How long how long will I slide
Separate my side I don’t
I don’t believe it’s bad
Slit my throat
It’s all I ever

Mandatum

2010-04-01T14:00:00.005+05:30

Quite knowing why, I succumbed once more
To what I'd resigned not long before
The sand's been turned, my time's begun
And the necessary has been done

I cursed the smoke yet lit the fire
Burnt my life on a two inch pyre
The song's the same, the words repeat
You can check out, but never leave

[PS: rorschach, thanks for the lines]

Friendly Fools

2010-03-21T03:00:00.000+05:30

All along the road less travelled
Where shadows still abound;
I met a youngish spriteful man
wearing sorrow in his gown
Said me to him "Hey you,
are you walking along my way?
If you are and are alone,
then do join me for the day"
He said not a word but followed me
as I blissfully trod along
But when I started reminiscing,
he broke out into song:
"Life's too short to recollect,
and spend time in the past
Whether 'tis for friends long gone
Or some faraway young lass"
We spent the day cavorting
and to night it quickly turned
And with the light extinguished
the shadows more deeply burned
Sitting beside the glowing fire
that threw embers in the air
My new found friend thought silently
and twiddled his fingers into his hair.
We ate what nature offered us;
We did not go a-hunting
For we felt He would provide for us
and not leave us a-wanting
As we padded the ground with leaves
that had long since turned brown
My companion's mood sunk suddenly
and his smile turned to a frown
He spoke aloud once supine,
his words directed at the stars
"Would you accept a small barter,
if I told you I have the power?
Your soul for the rest of your life
spent in wondrous happiness
And – No – I'm not the devil,
I'm with you – this is just a test

See what I am is an angel,
an agent of the Lord
But we don't do his bidding constantly,
sometimes we just get bored
And for once think for yourself,
not about what you've been told to do
All those parables, all those texts,
don't apply with what you've been through.
Yes, I'd know, I've been watching you.
You're what you could call my ward
I'm the go-to guy for your prayers,
the middleman to your God.
We don't get much by way of payment,
just immortality and all that jazz
But we're allowed to fuck around once
and tease our wards real bad.
And yes, in case you’re wondering,
I’ve made this offer before
Let me give you some examples,
to show you what’s in store”
And he reached to me and showed me
(in his own mysterious way)
Those who had come before me
and had accepted his hefty wage
Emboldened, with the sun rising,
I turned to him once more
“Could you show me – if I rejected you –
what my life has yet in store”
And then he showed me misery,
my own suffering beyond belief.
The tides would pull more fervently
and I would be forever bound with grief
I had no time to think,
(and that’s exactly what he had predicted
Who knew this joyful little man
could have been in truth so vindictive)
“Make your choice before the sun
strikes the roots of yonder trees
Or I’ll disappear forevermore
and you’ll be eternally on your knees”
So I sold my sold to my new found friend
and gleefully he cried
“I’ve been called crazy before
but y’know I’m just you inside.
See how the sun approaches,
and lo, I’m still standing here.
Our barter stands on mutual lands,
but I’m not the powers that you fear.
For those are reserved for you –
you loathe what you’ve become”
And just like that the day had broken
and his face shown from the sun.

Decades it’s been and I’m still here.
As for my soul I cannot say.
What happened during that fateful night,
and what happened the following day
For there's no such thing as the devil,
the horns and pitchfork are myth
True evil lies within us all,
it’s up to us to see it and admit.
And for those who feel they’re justified
and righteous in their path
Fall under the sin of arrogance,
and will still incur His wrath
That’s of course if you’re assuming
that there’s someone up on high
For all you know it could be a bluff,
another frolicking friend of the night.
You see just as a word has different meanings,
based on the parties that are involved
A soul that’s been sold can always be justified
by the way the story has been told.
And my story’s far from over,
for I’ve still many miles to go.
But know this, the path that you take
will rarely be the yellow brick road.
There are struggles that you will face
that will put your firmest beliefs to test
And through it all don't ever forget,
you’re just like all the rest.
God and his hosts, they may exist,
and if they did it would be great
But so long as you’re here you’re on your own,
the master of your own fate.
Right or wrong, these are defined
by the truth you mould yourself
And that’s the simple fact to it,
there’s nothing really left to tell.

The last laugh

2010-03-06T04:25:00.001+05:30

I know not, nor can I tell
Whether ‘tis right for me to speak
Of how thine words afflict my mind
And leave my heart so weak

You are such stuff that dreams are made
And the treasure that all men seek
The destination for this broken road
The faith behind all beliefs

But if all the world’s a stage
And thespians we all must be,
Clad in pied clothing, always a-joking
I’ll play my part happily

For I know not nor can I tell
Of what stuff am I to thee
If ‘tis only fools that do rush in
Then a clown forever I’ll be

Ash Wednesday

2010-02-17T21:44:00.004+05:30

You realise that God has a sense of irony when you decide to quit smoking on Ash Wednesday.

In the auto on the way to work, Mom calls up, "It's Ash Wednesday... the start of Lent... just reminding you"

So this is me trying to resist the temptation of bursting into flames on a two inch pyre.

Less than ten hours into my new decision (and just over twenty four hours from my last cigarette), I already feel the craving. And I see the truth in the words of old Greg, that most people smoke - without knowing it - because they want to die at least as much as they want to live. Because it's better to have hurt inside you than nothing at all. Believe you me, I know.

Already a very morbid start to this year's period of mourning. But then again, could there be any other way?

"The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean"

- Hebrews 9:13, NIV

2010-02-16T09:41:00.001+05:30

"As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters."

- Seneca

Of ageing (ungracefully)

2010-02-15T20:38:00.010+05:30

I was at a friend's birthday party this past Saturday night (was one helluva party too). I had taken along another friend who is currently staying with me, let's call him SRK for now (and I know two people who would love that)

At the party SRK and I were standing around and doing our thing, which isn't saying much, now that I think of it. We met this chap who's a pilot and what not and generally began chatting with him about his career and all that. Damn nice guy, damn sweet and all that. When we asked him his age, said pilot replied that he was 21 years old, at which both SRK and I (who are 23 and 24 respectively) turned to each other surprised because - and let's face it - once you hit 23, everything below seems that much younger. We didn't think much about it then though, we were pretty hammered ourselves.

Fast forward to five minutes ago, I'm at work sitting next to Big Z (who's 27), and I remember and narrate the above story to him, ending with the comment "I can't believe we now find a 21 year old guy young"

Comes reply: "Get used to it asshole. It only gets worse from here"

From the desk of T J Eckleburg

2010-02-06T03:43:00.002+05:30

It is night, around him and within him, in his soul and in his mind, in his home and in his city; and such nights do not give him peace. They never had and they never will. He knew this - the old man had told him so. It was just that the old man had reasoned it differently. Either he did not know the real cause or he knew too much of it to tell so young a boy; a boy not yet capable of looking after himself; no sense of responsibility, no sense of concern; a selfish, self-centered boy.

The night was broken by the shining lights of an electronic device that served to distance him a little further from those around him, every single day. Thousands of people could be seen through it and a humdrum of their chanting voices was met by the stony silence of those who have nothing to say, to each other and to themselves. The mindlessness of one of his passions reminded him of his failures. He is only eighteen. He scored twice. At least he has done something with his life. Must have gotten a lot of support from those around him. Silent voices accused themselves and defended others. Not a sound escaped the crack between the lips and this was the only way that love could survive, at least for a while.

The battle is over; won by the better side and the celebrations follow. They have been victorious. In their minds they smile and laugh, within their souls they suspect that victory is relative. Soon they will lose to someone else and will be framed losers. They might not lose to anyone for another twenty battles, but at some point there will be someone better than they and their names shall again be forgotten. The ones who lost now have it easier for they will get over it quicker. The bitterness of defeat shall be mild for they never tasted the sweetness of victory. And how lucky each thinks the other.

He gets up to light a candle, to break the darkness that ensued soon after the shining lights were removed. He still hopes for a good night. It is a mistake on his part to say it out loud. His breath blows out the match and he knows the night will be long. He relates his story to himself, calmly, softly. He will relate it to the others, calmly, softly. They shall speak to him, calmly, softly; and no one will be able to help for he is beyond that. It is a perverse sort of pleasure that he always enjoys when he realizes that he is alone.

The lights shine again and they seem just as insignificant. But they are not, for only they can assuage the rage that grows within him, gnaws at his insides, hurting him and telling him that he has to do something to rid himself of it, but he sits and stares, sometimes at the shining lights and sometimes at the soulless words that are pouring from within him and his rage grows. Rage. Rage compounded by rage upon rage. Rage enough to blot out the sun. These words ring through his mind (They were words that he had read elsewhere. He had not the skill to come up with such words and this infuriated him, burned his insides and momentarily lit up the night until he realized that it was useless). The words he came up with always promised to take him away, into a faraway, magical land (like the lands that Enid Blyton would take him to when he was younger), and then unceremoniously drop him back into the dark night, shivering as though he had been attacked by all the devils in hell.

He was given another matchstick, another candle, another failure. The darkness is good. The darkness helps guard against the burning light.

It would pass, he said to himself, as it always did. And it would return, as it always did. Nobody had any right to control his life, he was told, but he knew they had no choice; he was not capable of doing it himself. He never would be. The words might pour out from his soul, from his mind, from within every particle that made up his misshapen body, but none would be good enough. Some are not meant to be good enough. They have to stay alive to let those who are know how good they are. Contentment was never enough because contentment was a fantasy created by men to be able to live life without killing themselves.

Death was too far away and this was what he wanted. All men are cowards when death makes the rounds. There is no man who had won over it and only stories said they had. He had read such stories and also tried to write a few. Past mistakes never help and they are not the building blocks of success; they are the clouds which darken the night.

He will fight dawn with all his might and lose. Dawn will bring a new hope, a new discovery, a new day, another opportunity to hope for a good night and a new failure. He stays up and waits for dawn and lights another matchstick.

2010-01-29T12:31:00.003+05:30

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."

Invictus

2010-01-27T00:53:00.001+05:30

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

- William Ernest Henley

2010-01-11T23:50:00.002+05:30

"Someday, when our blood has cooled, and the wide open windy places are revealed to us, when our achievements have been crushed to dust by those who are younger, brighter, with the energy of our spent youth, we will meet at a tavern, we will raise our glasses to one another, we will collapse in helpless laughter all over again.

In the interim, we wait, not without impatience."

Love is Noise

2010-01-10T11:03:00.005+05:30

I've been wondering what it would be like to make music videos for of a living. This is a thought I've played around with in my head ever since I was old enough to illegally download content off our departed friends like Kazaa, Morpheus, and many, many others. And David (Dave) Meyers used to be my favourite video director back in the day.

To me music, when accompanied with a strong enough visual input (doesn't have to be a video, could be just staring at a blank wall) takes on a different emotional dimension.

Case in point is The Verve's Love is Noise video. It consists of mash ups, shots of people in ultra slow motion, scenery, and abstract themes. All in all, a beautiful work of art.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTzmIgRuQ0

Will those feet in modern times
Walk on soles that are made in China?
Feel the bright prosaic malls
In the corridors that go on and on and on

Are we blind - can we see?
We are one - incomplete
Are we blind - In the shade
Waiting for lightning - to be saved

Cause love is noise and love is pain
Love is these blues that I'm singing again
Love is noise and love is pain
Love is these blues that I'm singing again, again

Anno Domini

2010-01-07T03:05:00.003+05:30

When the clock struck midnight on the last day of the last year of the first decade of the third millennium of the year of our Lord, I was out cavorting with four friends whom I’ve known for more than five years and one more whom I had just met.

When the two hands of the clock met to give the illusion of a single finger sticking straight out the middle, we were rolling into old watering holes we had not been in half a decade. Some of them had remained exactly the same while others had drastically changed for the worst. It wasn’t, in the eyes of many, what you would call a “cool” night, but it was, nonetheless, a whole lotta fun.

Ten hours later, I was standing on a platform where I had last been over five years earlier and where I’d said goodbye to it all, waiting to greet a friend I hadn’t met in three months to arrive from a town I’d never been to. We drove around Chowringhee and stopped at New Market and paid a visit to the Cathedral where I saw what I had seen every weekend for ten years of my life through new eyes and new wonder.

Nine hours later, I was standing in a room where I’d had my first sip of Heineken all those years ago with people who were screaming and singing into the air and firecrackers exploding into the eight storey sky outside as we tried to Save the Night, but – as always – would fail.

When Londoners and people along the Greenwich Meridian were doing the exact same thing, I was sending off notes to ghosts and, assailed by pangs of hunger, craving for cupcakes and a two week or two year (either would have suited me perfectly) rewind on life.

We celebrate the New Year's not to greet the one that comes, but to bid farewell to the one that has gone by. Whether it is with tears or with smiles, it does not matter, as long as it is one of either and not neither.

Watchmaker

2009-11-28T06:01:00.004+05:30

Who makes the world? Are its contours shaped by our hands, our choices? Or are we merely pawns, guided by a higher power?

It is spring in the village. She walks besides him as she examines the wares of thrift stores and shops selling modest trinkets. He can only think about the times he had been to the same street earlier, with so many different people for so many different reasons. They pass the book store he used to frequent, the coffee shop he would seek reprieve in, the many faces of the shopkeepers individually unknown but collectively so familiar. It’s been ten months since he danced with her without abandon and she spun his world around. Her hand slips into his and pulls him gently out of his reminiscing, bringing his attention to the valuation and eventual haggling over the price of certain wares.

Are our actions our own and no one else’s? If so, how can we explain inevitability – the obvious actions we choose to take when faced with a choice weighed so heavily on one side? Does not the situation exert its own force on our decision? Are we really, individually, to blame?

It is autumn in the garden. The room comes with a view, the weather is perfect. Old haunts once again glide past him, but these are places discovered with her. Two months later he will be taking a late night stroll by the bay, looking for ways to kill himself in fractions, piece by piece, asking dishevelled strangers and locals for directions. But she is sitting across the room, unable to carry herself to where he is, tears in her eyes, shaking with anger, betrayal, sorrow. He had told her the truth. He had to. Was that so selfish? He couldn’t answer that right now. The truth is so often not what we want to hear. But does that make it wrong? The vacation passes. New facades are created. Fresh lies are woven. Old friendships are strained. Past lovers are invoked.

If you think about choices made that you regret, you realise how you would have made the same one all over again. Regret is not changing the past. It’s just remorse over a path you chose. It should not be about wishing you had chosen the other path, you couldn’t have. It’s about not wanting to be on the path you’re currently on.

It is summer by the bay. A nightclub situated in the old town. In fifteen months time she is crying, sitting on the bed across him not able to look at him. Right now, she sways in his arms to the music, poetry in motion, a song being written, a story being told. He bends to her swirling, wanting to only fold himself into her. She too cannot help but notice the chemistry and the physics, the symmetry and the fluidity. She smiles. He falls in love. Gears meshing together with infinite precision, they dance the night away.

While regret stems from the past, fear stems from the future. And it is important to realise that you don’t have to be immune to both to make the hard decisions. No regret means that you have come to terms with where you are and accepted that some of your actions may not have been entirely correct, but no fear means that you are ready to do whatever it takes to change all of that. It’s not about seeing the future or changing the past. It’s about making the present.

It will be winter in the valley, and the shadows will loom high. Yet street lights will pierce through the veils splintering through the silhouettes of the trees, lighting up the night around him and providing him comfort. He will look for solace in a two inch pyre but not find it and blame it on inevitability, again, and wonder if he was meant not to. She will be lying in the arms of another, softly purring in her sleep and dreaming of a future different from the one she had envisioned in her past. He will hear a song sung halfway across the world and have his own epiphany, realising that no matter which city you are in, you don’t have to sell your soul to gain the world. He will instead barter his pride and make the right choice and hope for the best. What he makes of his future from then on, not even he will be able to tell.

Someday...

2009-11-16T22:05:00.003+05:30

...she'll be mine.

Yeah so the inspiration comes from Archibald's musings. But that just gave it the form. The message would have been the same.

And thank you D&G.

Punchline

2009-10-29T13:59:00.002+05:30

If you can't laugh at something, then you'll never be able to take it seriously.

Hope are there

2009-10-27T01:15:00.002+05:30

There was her, her best friend, my best friend, and I. We drove in an open jeep down a white pebbled road that ran alongside the bluest ocean I have ever seen, bluer than the lakes of Tibet, bluer than the waters off the coast of Australia. The ocean stretched out bearing small isles in the distance, but there were no people, no signs of civilization to be seen for miles around. It was summer, but the sun and the warm breeze were pleasant, the kind of summer you find in movies and stories, and the salt spray from the ocean danced across our faces. Despite the time of the year, my friend and I were in tuxedos and they were garbed in traditional saris. I don't know why we were there. I don't know where we were coming from. But I do know that we did not really know nor care where we were going.

Freedom. From thought, from society, from civilisation, from ourselves and everything we thought we wanted to be.

We always try to live up to our own expectations, not to speak of the expectations of others. Yet rarely do we wonder about living up to our own hopes.

Life is always more than one expects for and less than one hopes.

2009-10-22T14:19:00.002+05:30

You know you're becoming more of a geek when Tuesdays and Thursdays don't excite you because there isn't a new xkcd coming out. That, or your job is really, really, boring.

"A laptop battery contains roughly the stored energy of a hand grenade"
http://xkcd.com/651/

The last place may not be the last

2009-09-18T18:12:00.002+05:30

I've always wondered if "life as we know it" really isn't as we know it.

source: http://xkcd.com/638/

Bootlegs

2009-09-13T09:25:00.002+05:30

So here I am still standing here
Singing songs to you
And in my mind I'm wondering
If it's me you're listening to
All the dreams I've ever had
Will they ever come to stay
I don't want to ask you
Cause I don't want you to say

Place not your pearls before swine

2009-08-14T17:56:00.002+05:30

Keeping the doctor away

2009-08-12T17:14:00.003+05:30

If I ever buy and iPhone / iPod, it'll be for TTR.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsnJbIgl_qc

I guess I'm still a little true to my Mongoloid roots...

It's been awhile

2009-08-12T05:02:00.003+05:30

...since I was up at five in the morning. Don't get me wrong, I owe this one to Mumbai's highly resilient mosquitoes and not to any early bird notions.

But still, five am, when the world is asleep but when dawn has come and when dreams end and people start to get up and start to chisel away at their lives with hope and faith...

Good morning world...

City of Joy

2009-08-09T00:42:00.001+05:30

The old city starts leaking back into me the minute I step out of the aeroplane’s fuselage. The air hits me first, clammy and hot, exactly like it always was at this time of the year. The summer season is never kind on our country’s populace in general, and on my old city of Joy in particular. The next thing that hits me is the smell, though it’s not a smell in the most common sense of the word, it’s not what it smells of but how it smells of it. I like to believe that of all my senses, my olfactory ones are the most keenly tuned, and I identify cities and places not by sights and sounds, though these play their own part as well, but it is always my nose that informs me, with almost divine certainty, that I have arrived home.

And as the taxi speeds past old haunts and familiar corners, places I would stop by so often as part of a daily or weekly routine, they seem somewhat foreign to my sense of sight and sound. It’s as if you’ve been dreaming about a city all your life and one day you wake up to find that it’s actually there in front of you. Only now, since you’re not dreaming, the spaces between the lines drawn by your imagination are filled out by untried colours and words and splatter of urine and paan and old telephone wires tangled in a bunch underneath poles hoisting lamps that have long stopped working. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I ever remembered it as being clean, it’s just that perhaps I forgot about the muck, or perhaps it has really grown dirtier since I last left it. I’ll leave the choice up to the reader, for there is only a limited amount of certainty by which an author can assert him or herself.

But when I step back on foot onto the streets that I once danced, the sights and the sounds surrender to that all surmounting power of smell and that smell, dank yet breezy, yellow yet grey, is what anchors me back to my own recollections and convinces me that this all has not been a dream. I walk, through bright lights of the city’s largest streets and through lanes and dark alleys where two cars can naught pass each other on, I walk, past trams clanking along slowly barely half full with passengers and street vendors doling out copious amounts of their wares onto leafs folded into watertight vessels filled to the brim with spiced water, I walk, back into memories and thoughts and faces and names that I can’t remember but know of all the same, I walk, and realise how true it really is, that places and people, even myself, are but an image of what is remembered forever.

2009-07-01T16:03:00.000+05:30

So this blog is proving difficult to maintain. It's been a while since I put up something blog worthy, and will be at least a week before I actually do, not that it's the most read blog in history or anything.

Till then, someone in my office has a ringtone that took me back... Wiki'd the song and presto...

Way down upon de Swanee ribber (river)
Far, far away,
Dere's wha my heart is turning ebber,
Dere's wha de old folks stay.

All up and down de whole creation
Sadly I roam,
Still longing for de old plantation
And for de old folks at home.

Chorus
All de world am sad and dreary,
Ebry where I roam,
Oh! darkies how my heart grows weary,
Far from de old folks at home.

All round de little farm I wandered
When I was young,
Den many happy days I squandered,
Many de songs I sung.

When I was playing wid my brudder
Happy was I
Oh! take me to my kind old mudder,
Dere let me live and die.

Chorus
All de world am sad and dreary,
Ebry where I roam,
Oh! darkies how my heart grows weary,
Far from de old folks at home.

One little hut amond de bushes,
One dat I love,
Still sadly to my mem'ry rushes,
No matter where I rove

When will I see de bees a humming
All round de comb?
When will I hear de banjo tumming
Down in my good old home?

I'll be singing this at work for the next week or so... at least

REM

2009-06-26T00:39:00.000+05:30

Eight hours of sleep, a dream where I travelled to space and to the depths of the earth, where I saw love on a lighthouse light up an entire man made island, where kittens littered and a friend got married. And still you were there.

3 a.m.

2009-06-15T03:01:00.001+05:30

I envy those who go to bed at night knowing that someone somewhere says a small prayer for them with an aching and a longing heart. Those whose mind's lie on a pillow of sweet memories and under a blanket of a hope for the future. Whose sleep is not easily stirred, and for whom rest comes swiftly and deeply. Content.

So unlike those whose sleep is shaken by the howl of street dogs in the moonlight and whose dreams chased away by the horn of the ships coming into port. Whose solace is solace and for whom every day is followed by a sleepless night with eyes weary, yet not slumbering, and bones aching yet constantly moving. And for whom the only companion is the vast and empty expanse of the night, ringing silently in their ear.

Dog Eat Dog

2009-06-05T17:33:00.003+05:30

There's a new device out on the Indian market called a "Bow Lingual" which interprets dog barks and translates them into English. Outputs such as "Feed me, I'm hungry" and "I'm frustrated" to a wireless handheld device with the user define six states of emotions of the dog.

Page 8 of today's Mumbai Mirror (which I don't think is much of a paper in the first place)
http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Client.asp?Daily=MMIR&showST=true&Enter=true&Skin=MIRRORNEW&GZ=T

Inaccuracy aside (the manufacturer, Takara, touts it as just an "entertainment device"), as a dog lover, I loathe the thought of latching an electronic device onto my dog's collar and using it to interpret what my dog is feeling. It just takes too much out of the bond between man and animal.

Heroes

2009-06-04T12:27:00.006+05:30

First off, I hated the TV series by the same name. So this is in no way related to that.

Last night, I came home from a particularly depressing day at work to find that Warner Brothers' was screening Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins at the 10:30 slot on their new television channel WB. Having seen the sequel at least a dozen times on high definition print and being the zealous fan that I am, I sat through the entire film for what must have been the sixth time (at the end of it, my flatmate commented that I knew the dialogues from the film as well as the exact intonations with which they were said). At the end I couldn't help but compare certain aspects of the second film to the first. I wouldn't say that either was better than the other but there was one recurring theme in both.

You see, the concept of a hero in most people's minds has to do with sacrifice. Most contemporary heroes are those who indeed do just that. Take for instance the highly cliche examples of firemen running into burning buildings, police and army men laying down their lives for the safety of their community, even the industrious businessman who has risked so much and put in so much time and effort to build something that will outlive him and provide employment to thousands, if not, millions.

Towards the end of Batman Begins, the protagonist, Bruce Wayne, comes face to face with his enemy, Ra's Al Ghul during his own birthday party and has to "explain the situation" to his guests, that is, get them out of his house as fast as he can so that their lives are spared from the crossfire. Bruce feigns drunkenness and very rudely ejects his guests out, calling them all sorts of names. He vilifies himself to save innocent people, even though those are the same people that say that "the apple has fallen far from the tree", referring to Bruce's philanthropic father whose memory he has now tarnished.

While Bruce Wayne has become the billionaire playboy, the spoilt brat, his alter ego, Batman, remains the masked crusader for justice.The Dark Knight however, sees Batman taking on the mantle of a murderer in order to cover up the actions of Harvey Dent, who was driven insane by the movie's villain (and personal favourite) the Joker as part of his scheme to plunge the city into chaos and anarchy and suck all hope out of the city. Batman vilifies himself to save the city, even though it is the city's police force who now hound him.

The point in both these stories is that a hero is more than a person who runs into a building or takes a bullet or burns the midnight oil. These people at the very least had glory on their side. They gave up their lives, but not the memory of their lives, and were lionised into something greater than what they gave up. Not so the Batman and Bruce Wayne, who gave up their very reputations and staked more than their lives for the greater good.

The closest real life analogy that I can think of is our parents. Whenever a man or woman is successful, we rarely think about the toil that his or her parents must have gone through, the sacrifices that they would have had to make, for their child. And the glory goes completely to the man or woman alone. I think everyone's parents deserve a lot more credit than they get. And instead of looking up to the sky to catch a glimpse of a hero, maybe we should just take a look at the person who stands by us through everything, the person who catches us when we fall.

The drawbacks of liquid face soap...

2009-05-20T11:19:00.002+05:30

Today I washed my face with my shaving cream.

It's not too bad; makes my skin smoooooth...

Tiny Vessels

2009-05-05T21:01:00.002+05:30

Night in the city once again and like always there's something familiar about it and at the same time something different.

Death Cab for Cutie, ladies and gentlemen, music is not dead, it does not belong to the sixties or the seventies or the eighties, it's always been here. Always will be.

All I see are dark Grey clouds
In the distance moving closer with every hour
So when you ask "Is something wrong?"
I think "You're damn right there is but we can't talk about it now
No, we can't talk about it now"

So one last touch and then you'll go
And we'll pretend that it meant something so much more
But it was vile, and it was cheap
and you are beautiful but you don't mean a thing to me
yeah you are beautiful but you don't mean a thing to me

Tenderloin, anyone? (Vegetarians beware)

2009-05-01T09:52:00.001+05:30

I have now backwardly integrated my love for all things non-vegetarian. At the behest (read coercion) of my father, I recently embarked upon a journey to learn how to cook – with the aid of my mother of course. On the menu was fried pork with bamboo shoots.

The first order of business was to cut the frozen raw pork. This part needs no explanation to tell you that it was fun. I love handling knives (though am far from adept at peeling fruits in a single stroke and using the principle of the opposing thumb) Cutting up chunks of frozen meat (especially pork from Mizoram, which contains immensely thick layers of pork fat) using a cleaver takes me back to the days of Jason vs. Freddy, minus the blood, but with all the imagined fear of the-being-chopped. Plus there is immense satisfaction in slicing off that perfect layer of pork + fat and dropping it into the marinating bowl.

This brings us to the uber-exciting part – the marinating. For those of you who remember the Mark Wahlberg starring movie, The Big Hit, you would recall a very cute Asian school girl (in plaid skirts, no less) being kidnapped by the protagonist (Wahlberg) and brought to said protagonist’s home while the ransom was being demanded, denied, destroyed etc. And yes. The marinating. There is something morbidly erotic about marinating pieces of dead meat with bare hands. Something incredibly gratifying about the way the meat slips and oozes through your fingers as you slap it around the bowl and roll it about in your hand. You can go ahead right now and accuse me of necrophilia but I’m not going to take it back. In fact, go and try it yourself and then tell me what you think. Maybe I’m one of those sex maniacs with a fetish for dead meat. Scary [shudders] And yes, The Big Hit has a scene where the protagonist and the damsel-in-distress (distressed by the protagonist himself) share a marinating bowl where their hands get all touchy and feely along with the gooey meat and icky things happen.

After that it’s pretty simple. Drop into one big tub of burning oil, add bamboo shoots (or whatever your little heart pleases), add corn flour for gravy, stir occasionally for even frying. Serve.

Oh did I mention I also sawed the head off a chicken, de-feathered it using boiling water, cleaned out the insides, cut up the still bloody bird into more manageable chunks which were then fried as well (no I’m not really getting on a health trip here).

I’m thinking of starting a club of meat lovers (all kinds, no “I don’t eat this” or “I don’t eat that” stuff). I’ll call it “Please Eat Tasty Animals”

PS: thanks to Fishy for the name, and trust me to name a friend after a food section on the menu

...Long live the King!

2009-05-01T09:12:00.000+05:30

While I was flipping through Lido Anthony Iacocca's autobiography (which I feel has more lessons in management than two years in a b-school) I couldn't help but draw parallel's to the present state of the big three in Detroit. When Iacocca took over Chrysler way back in the 80's, the company had, then too, resorted to the drastic 'anti-capitalist' measure of going to congress for a bailout. Iacocca defends this as being capitalist in that it was preserving competition. That seemed like a good enough argument; though it's obvious that the bailout was approved more to safeguard the image of politicians as being sympathetic to the plight of thousands of workers (in their constituencies) who would be laid off. Don't get me wrong; given a choice I'd prefer Democrats over Republicans, but that's a lot like choosing the Congress over the BJP.

Iacocca says that the failure of the big three had been a result of the unexpectedness of the Iranian Revolution and the sudden shortage of oil. Indeed, GM and Ford followed Chrysler to the taxpayers wallet soon after. Despite being a fan of free markets, I couldn't help but feel that the man kinda had a point.

But thirty years later, it's the same story all over again. Sure the global recession and all is to blame but Toyota also took a bad hit but I don't see them filing bankruptcy, and they're headquartered in Japan of all places!

I think that Iacocca is a great man. I think what he did for Chrysler back then was astounding and, by many accounts, considered impossible. But after getting bailed out twice and still ending up in Chapter 11, I don't imagine - rather I don't hope - that socialism in the self-proclaimed land of the free is an experiment many would dabble in.

On the eve of the more recent auto bailouts (or was it just after, I can't recall), Thomas Friedman, in an article on the New York Times, compared the bailouts to "investing in the Walkman the day before the ipod was released", a metaphor I personally enjoyed.

"Preserving" competition? More like freezing it. I hear adding a bit of salt helps as well.

Till geekdom come (boredom's already here)

2009-04-23T11:01:00.000+05:30

So now that I'm on my way to my first job ever, my uncle and his wife offered to buy me a new phone on an unlimited budget. It went something like this.

Uncle comes over. We chat for a while, he mentions he's lost his cell phone and is planning to buy a new one. Asks me for my opinion. Being the geek that I am, I start off on a long list of phones, having memorised most of their pros and cons.

I'm a gadget freak, especially when it comes to phones. I swear. It's the most jobless thing ever in the world, but I can spend hours on web and youtube reviews about phones. It's not healthy, and I don't always follow up on my "the next phone I am going to buy" decision, but I find it fun and I think it's more productive than reality TV anyway.

So about fifteen minutes, eight phones, and a spec sheet long enough to compete with the criminal records of all the politicians currently standing for elections, my uncle asks me simply, "what would you buy if you were in my place". I recommended the Xperia X1, given the fact that he's a doctor and all that and will need less of the multimedia and ShoZu integration et al... Then my uncle goes, ok I'll buy it for you. Which leaves me very surprised and happy of course.

But now I'm in a bit of a quandary. See being the geek that I am, the minute he offered to buy me a phone, I went and looked up ten others that may be better. Thing is, like so many things in life, they each had pros and cons (I hate it when things are like things in life, that's why I love fiction of any form or kind).

Ok so this post is more of a rant out of boredom than anything else. Sitting in a state that is under prohibition with the only bottle in reach under lock and key with my mom is not conducive to creative self-destruction.

In any case, here's my conundrum (and feel free to skip the following cause it's just specs and shite)

The Xperia X1 is a sexy phone. I mean if I was a phone I would want to look and act like the X1. The panels interface has to be the most eye catching interface since HTC's touhcflo (HTC did help Sony with this one). It also has a touchscreen and a beautifully crafted QWERTY keyboard as well as pocket office and though the built in player doesn't support divx, the WinMo OS allows you to get 3rd party apps that do. However, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles. The camera is crappy, but that's something I'm willing to overlook cause frankly, after getting an SLR, no non-SLR camera can cut it (even those bulky bridge cameras - yeah yeah geek in pink I am). What it seriously does lack however is good internal memory and an FM transmitter (yes I am being supremely choosy, but hey, unltd budget)

http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_xperia_x1-2246.php

The other option is the INNOV8 which by God has to be the best thing that ever happened to mobile telephony. It's custom designed for multimedia and has a bloody v8 engine. It has an 8 mp camera with more bells and whistles than I've seen in most digicams. Geotagging, face detection, panorama shots, image stabalisation; it even has that worthless smile detection and a new blink bloody detection. Drool. (as this post progresses, I am sounding more and more geeky, screw it) It also has 16 GB of internal memory but fails on the FM transmitter bit too, but I am willing to overlook that as well. What I am a bit hesitant to overlook is the no touch screen part. Although I don't think I will ever be able to use a full touchscreen phone, I like the touchscreen and then slide out qwerty form of the Xperia X1.

http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i8510_innov8-2471.php

Finally comes the n97. Just when I had given up hope for Nokia, they go and announce this baby. This phone has everything a geek could desire. Even though the camera is only 5 mp strong, I don't think it really matters, shooting pics at that resolution leads to large sized images which doesn't really make sense on a camera phone. It has 32GB of internal memory, an FM transmitter, pocket office, the kickass symbian OS, a 3.5 inch touch screen (fine it's resistive and not capacitive but then the handwriting tech comes into play) The one and only thing it does not have is the looks. It looks like a plastic pencil box to be honest. I mean Nokia, what happened to you guys? The best phone that is going to hit the market and you design it like something out of a 70's science fiction television serial. That is the only problem with this phone and my god if you look at it, it's a problem.

http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_n97-2615.php

In case you did read this far, thanks. That's it from me and my rant.

Graduation Rations

2009-04-22T09:02:00.000+05:30

Now that we’re all set to enter the big bad world of corporate business and hang our consciences along with last night’s pyjamas as we head out for the day’s work, a couple of memos from the past few years of my life come to mind.

(Note that since some of these did take place eons ago, I will not be producing them in verbatim and in fact will be making some of the parts up, just to add effect. The essence, however, is still preserved.)

The first memo I heard only a year ago from an incredibly distinguished IIM alumnus who was delivering a speech to a rapt audience of soon-to-be-IIM-alumni. During his conversation with them, he was asked several questions, one of them being what, according to him, were the shortcomings, if any, in the MBA system in India when compared to the rest of the world. The esteemed Alumni replied that he felt that there was a marked lack of emphasis on health and physical fitness in institutes across the country. We have the best minds, the best facilities, but for some reason there is barely any awareness much less approval when it comes to running five times around a small field every day for the sake of longevity. And chain smokers, alcoholics-on-weekends, junk-foodies, alcoholics-after-ten-pm, unhealthy canteen food (not the mess), no little love for ordering big chunks of cheesy pizzas in, these were all abundant in the past two years of my life.

Not that I’m complaining mind you – which is probably the guy’s point in the first place.

The second bit comes from a continent away and was brought to my attention by the voodoo child. It was the eve of said child’s graduation from school (they call it 'graduation there, I suppose, even though she was only eighteen) and her Economics (or was it Philosophy and English?) professor was delivering the speech to the outgoing batch. Among the several things he said, one pearl follows. He started off by talking about a hypothetical situation. “Say you were given three hundred thousand Euros and were told to spend all of it (no saving, this was before saving became savvy). Of the many things you could do is buy a Hummer. Now a Hummer is massive. There are villages in Tibet that are smaller than a single Hummer. But it’s sexy (again, this is 2004), it’s cool, and it gives you about five miles to the gallon. Or, you could take that money and spend half of it on a weekend skiing vacation and still have enough left over to but the latest hybrid vehicle that while not being as powerful as the Hummer will still be more than enough equine muscle to get you around on your daily chores and not make a big black puddle in the middle of Alaska somewhere. The point is this. Money talks. Let your money speak for you.”

He then proceeded to crack several incredibly inane jokes in Latin which you and I are both better off not recalling.

The last memo came recently. It was during our very own convocation speech. The chairman of our institute's board stepped up to the podium and began recounting the time when he was in our shoes, graduating with an MBA (albeit in another country). He said that there are would be several things going through our minds, as indeed there were. There we were, being handed the world on a veritable platter. All of us ready to take on the challenges that lay ahead. Our chairman could have spoken about anything; he could have spoken about ethics in business and not letting go of one’s principles, about being environmentally friendly and caring about others and the state of the lesser fortunate than we were and other such David Copperfield crap (yes I had to use that line). You could almost say it was expected of him; but he didn’t. Instead, he summed it all up perfectly by simply reminding us of the people sitting just behind us, hidden from the glare of the flashes from the photographers and the stares from the cameras, all vying to capture us in our robed splendour. The ones without whom all of this wouldn’t have been remotely possible and, while we were the ones shining in our moment of glory, they were the ones who had been with us every time we were down in the mud. Our parents. The chairman said “as I graduated, the only thing on my mind was how to make my parents proud. The rest all follows from that” ... or something to that effect.

Later people found the speech more than a little ironical, given the facts which we all know. But it was true nonetheless.

The Lasting

2009-04-21T23:25:00.001+05:30

A hush descends over the stone lined pathways as the few who remain observe a penance-like silence out of respect for those who have left. Either that or they have had their energy sapped by the many adieus bid to lonesome strangers who were converted by the alchemy of friendship into loyal comrades and brothers in arms.

He left the same way he came in, with his parents and a sense of wonder, fear, excitement, and sadness all stirred nicely in his glass heart to from a concoction that he had tasted for the third time in his life now, and found all too bittersweet, for the third time in his life.

Rooms and places that were just numbers and names take on the avatar of homes for selves and friends and places to congregate late into the night and share tea and memories. The alchemist’s work stretches beyond human bonds and seeps into concrete, wood, stone, and glass.

That last day, he hadn’t slept. He had to see off a friend early in the morning (and had the luck to see off one more as well) and, when he went back to his room and lay in his bed, his heart wrenched in a funny way as he realised that he was leaving behind everything that he couldn’t.

Alchemy is not a science, it is not a myth, it does really work. Only it does not rely on any physical ingredients (though catalysts are known to exist), it does not have any ten-step process to convert the worthless into the priceless, it does not work for each and every thing and for each and every one. The miracle in alchemy is not the lead into gold bit, but the ability to convert a drab thought and a silly passing moment into a cherished memory. Call it retrospective falsification, but somehow, whenever we look in hindsight at the different eras of our lives, they never seem to be as bad as we thought. The living of life has a way of making the important a memory. The living of life itself is that alchemy. And we are but its apprentices.

Just before the car took the last turn at the gate – out into the crazy and crowded street that was so antithetical to the oasis of calm behind the ten foot tall stone walls – he looked back and smiled at the path he had tread with trepidation not long ago. He would return. Some day. After age had lessened his zeal and his works were replaced by those younger, better, stronger, faster, harder than he was. He would press on into the red setting sun, his brown leaves quivering in its warm embrace.

author's note: ending has been "inspired" :)

...and thanks for all the fish

2009-04-12T21:21:00.000+05:30

I guess it’s about time to write this one.

Of all the moments, for some reason I always remember the ones where I’m drunk and doing stupid things the most, even when I don’t really remember what I’d said or done, if you know what I mean.

‘Twas the night before Convo’
When all through the blocks
Not a creature was stirring
Not even a fox

...Except for a few drunken guys singing ‘The Recession Song’ on top of the block at the far end of the campus and blaming the current economic crisis on “Bush and his lackeys”

The last night of drunken revelry, when most people (not all though) were indeed resting after the Convocation eve show and in anticipation of the next morning’s rehearsal and the late evening’s main event, I was, again, drunk on beer, whiskey, and vodka respectively (that was not all though, the latter part of the night introduced me to my old friends, rum and Mary Jane, but that high is for another time)

The end of all we had come to know and love. We spent it making the ever-fun old age jokes at the old-age people present and of each other’s ethnicity and accents. Most of it, however, was spent in plain ol’ singin’. Old songs, new songs, good songs, bad songs; we sung ‘em all. We didn’t really talk about leaving and all that too much; come to think of it, we didn’t talk about the past two years at all. We just sat there and did our shit and probably pissed the hell outta some guys in the surrounding blocks like we’d done so many times before.

And in between it all, the thought that we’ll never be able to this again. The realisation that all good things come to an end, that nothing lasts forever, that the future had already arrived and the words of an acne-faced boy just out of his teens when he’d stepped into this place two years ago saying “I hope these two years just fly by” had indeed come true.

At one point I was left alone with my guitar gently weeping in my arms, cranking out any tune that came to mind. It’s funny, because no matter how happy you are in life, at any given point in time, it’s always tempered with this voice at the back of your head telling you that “this too shall pass away” and all. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, sometimes it’s good to keep yourself grounded, but it can get annoying as hell; having some dismembered voice tell you that all the time.

Still this emptiness persists.
Perhaps this is as good as it gets?

I got sentimental as crap though after most of the others had left. Not because of the leaving and all, I mean that was a part of it, but not all of it. I’m always doing or saying stupid things when I’m drunk. But that, too, is for another time.

The 4th Sense

2009-04-12T18:35:00.000+05:30

Freshly blossomed Easter Lilies and Liliums fill the house; their scent encompasses every corner, reminding me of you.

Holi Hai

2009-03-11T10:54:00.000+05:30

First off, Happy Holi.

Now here's my plan for the day.

Sit at the end of the corridor outside my room with a copy of the day's paper, a can of pepper spray and a BB gun. Wait for some poor shmuck to come charging down with colours splashed all over his face and hands. Then mace the fucker in the face just three feet from his target. Watch in satisfaction as he rubs his eyes with his paint-stained hands, hence aggravating the pain further. Then take pot shots at him with the BB gun, not taking care to not hit him in the eyes since they'll be tightly closed (and hopefully burning really badly) anyway. Hopefully by then he'll get the hint that I'm not really interested in colouring myself silly and leave.

Sit back, read the paper till next shmuck comes along.

"The Luxury of Grief"

2009-03-11T07:43:00.000+05:30

Grief comes to a person when something or someone is lost. It is not the best of feelings and many of us would rather we were over it as quick as possible - forget the past and move on. But the thing or person that is lost is grieved for because it or he or she was loved, and now will be no more (not to speak of death or the end of it but more of a paradigm shift in the way one relates to the thing or person lost)

We all grieve. Some more than others. In my younger days, I remember thinking that "the world is small, parting friends shall meet again", when the time to leave my school was upon me. So I did not grieve. I did not find it necessary to wallow in past memories and raise toasts to our beginning lives. At the end of college, the only grief I felt was because I would be leaving one good friend behind. One very good friend. I lamented that broken bond, maybe for too long, but it was not grief so much as it was mourning. The difference? Grief is when you are more nostalgic than sad, mourning is when you are more sad than nostalgic. Feel free to disagree. It's something I just came up with on the spot anyway.

Grief is a luxury. I could not afford it before not because of time or things to do but because I simply did not want to indulge myself. I've lived most of my life detached, a nomad who keeps moving - even within cities and within peoples. For a person who binges on the shopping list of change, Grief is a luxury I can ill afford.

So I will not grieve this time as well. I will not raise toasts to the past (except only with one friend) but to the future instead. I will not wallow in memories (except when talking about them of course) but will make plans for the future instead. I will feel nostalgic. And for the loss of the presence of the love of some friends, I will lament. I will shake hands and give that seemingly ominous and final hug, look back one last time and turn my body to salt. I will leave behind tidings to the tribute of those who follow me and one day return to do it all again, but I will not grieve.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter looking through a Scanner Darkly on a Dark & Stormy Night

2009-03-04T22:04:00.000+05:30

A storm is coming, Frank says.
A storm that will swallow the children,
and I will deliver them from the kingdom of pain.
I will deliver the children back to their doorsteps;
I'll send the monsters back to the underground.
I'll send them back to a place where no one else can see them,
except for me
because I am Donnie Darko

Did we really vote for THESE guys?

2009-02-27T21:11:00.000+05:30

...Congress floated the idea of an `achieving India' and listed among the milestones the Indo-US nuclear deal, Chandrayaan, near 9% growth and the total sweep of the Oscars...

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Cong-counts-8-Oscars-as-part-of-UPA-achievements/articleshow/4179161.cms

a) Danny Boyle is in no way Indian.
b) Bollywood and India as such played no part in the making of the movie (apart from providing crap infested shorelines, blood thirsty extremists who dress their kids up in the image of their gods, and the omnipresent dark eyed villain)
c) Had it not received the (undeserved, this author thinks) accolades that it did, there is a good chance that the same party would have struck down the film for its so-called derogatory depiction of India.

Oh and while we're at it, the UPA government was in no way responsible for the decline in inflation, which Mr. Mukherjee claimed at the interim budget.

What's a Unicorn?

2009-02-27T20:37:00.000+05:30

Ans: "You know, mythical beast... the car that can't be stolen"

- From Gone in 60 Seconds (2000)

Here's to the ones who keep trying, the ones who beat themselves up over mistakes they never committed, who move mountains only to find whole ranges lying behind them. Keep the faith and fight the good fight, for the struggle will make the victory taste so much sweeter.

Walk on.

Go Ape

2009-02-25T23:04:00.000+05:30

Time magazine's website today ran the following "Quote of the Day" -

"We have an African-American President, a female Speaker of the House — and there's the white guy."
KATIE COURIC, noting the diverse Democratic leadership triumvirate of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Joe Biden

As I recall, four years ago, India had a Muslim President, a Sikh Prime Minister (that's Taliban to all you American-philes), a foreign lady leading the party in power, and a Hindu leading the opposition party.

Who's aping who now?

Mocha Dreams

2009-02-25T10:07:00.000+05:30

And even though time dims our senses
And wrinkles our minds to dust
The yellow tree shall bloom again
Telling us everything’s not lost

And in the morning we’ll be gone
Back to the place before our birth
Brief lives remembered by epiphanies
And those rare pitchers full of mirth

The Departed

2009-02-23T03:26:00.001+05:30

The young have mirth,
While we are sapped and weary
Another tale ends in the middle of my story

What comes to pass?
We’ll be but an illustration
Of what’s remembered by those in our wake

Trials and midnight oil,
We’ve burned it all
And morning after night,
Amassed at the muezzin’s door,
To regale ourselves with laughter and stories of war

But, at length, we each depart,
In our own separate direction,
Our tired minds bent beyond the point of our inflexion

Yet the stories carry on
Till legends they become,
Our time immortalised in the red rays of the sun

Not a bittersweet song
Or a textbook story, we walk on
Constantly striving to achieve
But a glimmer of what we had during our arduous journey’s reprieve

Job Descriptions

2009-02-08T19:20:00.000+05:30

With the placement free-for-all just around the corner, and given the current shit we are all in right now, one has to really start considering the kind of things one wants to be doing for the rest of one's life (too many "one"s in that last sentence...)

So I've begun thinking of jobs from the point of view of the one-liner job description. It's really cool how some seemingly boring jobs kinda jump out and vice-versa. It makes your really rethink what you want to do. Of course, being the brash, naive brat that I am, I will not be without my biases. Feel free to comment, and I will make changes accordingly.

Evangelist - I give people hope.

Investment Banking - I tell really really rich people where to put their money so that they eventually can earn more than I will (else they won't come to me)

Marketing - I make you want stuff, even if you don't really want it in the first place.

Social Work (NGOs etc) - I do the dirty work that no one else wants to do and my payoff is not monetary.

Investment Banking v2 - I do the dirty work that no one else wants to do and my payoff is monetary.

Consultant - I tell people how to solve their issues (like an organization level shrink)

Shrink - I listen to people and tell them how to solve their issues.

Civil Servant - I run the country.

Police officer - I do the dirty work so that your kids can go out safely.

Roadside sweeper - If I didn't do my work, you'd have to do it.

Winner takes all

2009-01-27T05:17:00.000+05:30

Twenty Four hours ago, I was sitting on the terrace of Dormitory 22 sipping on a whiskey and Pepsi and screaming love ballads and the like into the skies of Ahmedabad, inebriated (but not so much that I couldn't come up with a good excuse when it was needed). Right now I'm sitting back in my room, half a subcontinent away, tired after a last minute rush through a submission on General Electric's Medical Systems and a short visit to that mad party on campus - which I will soon be sorely missing for more reasons than one - and wishing I had a beer with me right now.

The Ahmedabad visit was because of the first three way inter IIM sports meet, between the campuses of Ahmedabad, Bangalore, and Lucknow. Bangalore won, it was great, and we put up a short inter IIM music show to boot. But that's not what this is about.

What this is is a tribute to the true winners of the sports meet. Lucknow. Whose team turned up without any official funding from their institute, after travelling for several hours by train, playing matches despite knowing that they wouldn't win (for they did not have any girls' teams with them, and had to let the other two IIMs walkover them in those events, hence losing several points) and with a contingent of only 38 people, many of whom played multiple sports in the span of two days (one chap played six... yes six field sports in a single day. Several of the members of the sports councils from the Ahmedabad and Bangalore campuses commended their laudable feat, as did many students and players from both campuses.

The reason I label them the winners is not out of some gracious sense of magnanimity and awe, though I am not without these as well. I call them the winners because, to put it simply, we could not compete with them. They came not to win a trophy or show off their skills, but rather to take part in a brand new tradition. Win or lose, by simply turning up they had already achieved their goal. And at the end of the day, despite Bangalore carrying the trophy home and Ahmedabad revving up for next year's clash, the real truth of the matter is that we both are just playing games. What Lucknow showed us was true sports.

Superman

2009-01-22T00:29:00.000+05:30

Found an acoustic version of this song. It's funny how such a familiar song can sound so different, so fresh. Some things are best said softly.

I can't stand to fly
I'm not that naive
I'm just out to find
The better part of me

I'm more than a bird
I'm more than a plane
More than some pretty face beside a train
It's not easy to be me

Wish that I could cry
Fall upon my knees
Find a way to lie
About a home I'll never see

It may sound absurd
But don't be naive
Even heroes have the right to bleed
I may be disturbed
But won't you concede
Even heroes have the right to dream
It's not easy to be me

Up, up and away, away from me
It's all right
You can all sleep sound tonight
I'm not crazy, or anything

I can't stand to fly
I'm not that naive
Men weren't meant to ride
With clouds between their knees

I'm only a man in a silly red sheet
Digging for Kryptonite on this one way street
Only a man in a funny red sheet
Looking for special things inside of me
Inside of me
Inside me
Yeah, inside me
Inside of me

I'm only a man
In a funny red sheet
I'm only a man
Looking for a dream

I'm only a man
In a funny red sheet
And it's not easy

Its not easy to be me

Comic relief

2009-01-18T15:27:00.000+05:30

from Pearls Before Swine by Stephen Patsis

Art and Life

2009-01-13T01:58:00.000+05:30

In the past few days, I watched quite a number of movies. Maybe it was the boredom. Maybe it was the influx of suggestions from various friends. Maybe it was the free time I had after choosing classes on two days of the week. Whatever.

Spoilers are there.

First in line is Slumdog Millionaire. The movie is predictable and the accented English of the key characters is more reminiscent of a well rehearsed play from the Alliance Francaise rather than characters from the backalleys of Bombay's underworld. The movie fails to capture the grit and pain of the outcasts of Maximum City's society, falling far short of Suketu Mehta's brilliant journey through its grimy streets. Personally, to see it in the early forties of IMDBs top 250 movies as well as an obnoxiously high rating on Rotten Tomatoes was quite unbelievable. But all that said and done, the movie is brilliant. It's a grimy fairy tale and not really meant to inspire credibility. The undying love of the protagonist, Jamal, reminds one of the cheesy dialogues and scenes from a Veer Zara. But that's just the point. Rags to riches overnight with the love of your life dancing beside you at the train station is exactly the kind of cheesy, cliched, overused and pedestrian model that make people love Bollywood movies. The movie is vibrant, colourful and has the heart and soul of a city that never sleeps but is always dreaming. Nine out of ten.

Seven Pounds is based on the true story of a man who donates his organs (and in the grand finale, his life to sacrifice his heart and eyes) to seven people. The acting is superb. If you have seen The Pursuit of Happyness, you will know the kind of heart rending expressions that Will Smith is capable of and indeed pulls off in this movie. The cinematography and the screenplay is brilliant from start to finish, particularly the slow motion flashbacks of the tortured protagonist. However, the plot did have a few holes and the movie gets slow too early. For Will Smith fans and drama lovers, a great movie. Seven out of ten.

If you are a writer or even otherwise, then you simply have to watch Stranger than Fiction. The movie is eclectic and the narration is crisp. The movie does several things. It makes you question the life you live and the potential and the dreams that you have. But the real masterpiece is the ending. At first, it appears to have too happy an ending, but then you realise that that is exactly the point. The sparing of the protagonist's life is not meant to turn the movie into "a great art of fiction" but rather weigh the importance of human living and not just human life. Nine out of ten.

I'd never heard of Bruge before, despite one of my closest friends having spent the formative years of her life in Belgium (I doubt if she's been there as well). In Bruges portrays the city of Bruge as a dark and depressing place as Colin Farell's character repeatedly stresses. But the movies humour is unsurpassed, drawing parallels to Pulp Fiction. While being serious for the major part of the time, it breaks into moments of subtle comedy that make you roll on the floor laughing, really. Nine out of ten.

World War II never gets old. And more so the emancipation of the Jews and the heroic struggle of a people that met with the horrors of Genocide. However, Defiance lacks the overall punch of films like The Pianist or novels like Maus. The direction is brilliant, but the script lacks the power and the storyline settles down into being just another war film. I'd give the film a six on ten.

Behind every great movie is an idea that inspired it. The Watchowski brothers (did I spell that right?) are said to have taken their inspiration from the anime, Ghost in the Shell. While the series supposedly far outclasses the movie, the film itself does make one pause and think, and leaves one in that eerie place between second guessing everything you know and believing in what you want to whole heartedly. While the story is slightly predictable, the questions thrown up regarding what it means to be human and the fallacy of memory over fantasy bubble to the surface with an unmistakable poignancy. Eight out of ten for this classic, and watch out for the series.

Bitsy Poompkins and Hobbes

2009-01-08T04:52:00.000+05:30

In the moments of our lives
that are filled with more despair
than we ever thought we could stomach
come glimpses of emancipation and freedom
like a breeze rustling up the leaves of hope that have fallen to the ground.

In the aching of a heart and the searing of a memory
that stab us in the coldest hours of yesteryear’s night
as we lie awake but still, not moving, not stirring,
arise glimmers of happiness at times gone by
and gratitude for a cup half full of a well blended scotch.

In the minutes that lead to the dawn
and in the seconds before the light
when the mind is restless but, as such, without fear
comes the realization and the possibility
of a life that has only just begun to be lived.

Stream of Life

2009-01-06T09:35:00.000+05:30

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

- Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

A Veteran Toast

2008-12-28T20:29:00.001+05:30

The Soldier stumbles into his room like he does everyday. His tall frame stooped with fatigue of the ongoing battle. A battle which he fights not with bullets but with thoughts, not over land but over his soul, not for victory over another but for victory over himself.

Here's a toast to all soldiers, and one veteran in particular. To thank him for helping this greenhorn along his way and to point out when he falters. May he find the peace he fights so hard for.

The King is dead....

2008-12-12T08:09:00.000+05:30

While watching CNN last night, a news item flashed on the small bottom banner of the screen which said "UN pledge to give $2 billion in aid to developing countries" (okay I'm not really sure if it was the UN or some other organisation, I'll admit, but the point I'm trying to make follows).

A few days back, GM, Ford, and Chrysler's bailout plan was approved, albeit for a 'lesser' sum of $15 billion. Imagine that. 2 billion dollars for people who can't get three square meals a day, who are besieged with diseases and systems that have been enforced upon them (yes, democracy is not suited for all), and whose stories go untold, "under-reported" - take Sri Lanka for instance, where death tolls have exceeded those in Afghanistan this year, according to Time magazine; but hey, they didn't have trigger happy white boys running around with M60s now did they...

Thomas Friedman, in an article on the New York Times, called the bailout plan the equivalent of several things, my personal favourite being "...the equivalent of pouring money into CD players on the eve of the iPod's release..."

I don't see why they should bail-out the automakers. Granted, there will be massive layoffs and repercussions. But the big three knew that in business, there are risks. It's called capitalism, nimrods. You guys are the ones who espoused it a few decades back. If you can't give the customers what they want, of course they're going to buy someone else's stuff. That's where the hybrids come in, the electric cars, the cars whose emissions are the stuff of clean water. It may sound like science fiction, but then again, so did the Model-T back then.

I was of the mind that capitalism was dying out. (not that I really mind though) That bailouts are becoming the order of the day. But wait, they're now selling senator seats on the open market.

Whopp-tee-doo...

Lighter Vein

2008-12-02T15:22:00.001+05:30

A pinch of salt, a dash of pepper

2008-12-02T15:13:00.000+05:30

Taking a backseat and a different perspective, one wonders why the outcry over the terrorists attacks in Bombay seem to be louder this time around. Personally, I love Bombay. The sheer audacity and the fact that I knew people who were there when it happened made me more conscious of the mortality that shrouds us all.

But then again, most of middle, upper middle, and upper income India did as well. Perhaps this goes to prove a theory I expounded long back at the time of the reservations. That to get a populace involved, you have to take something away from them.

Just an observation. No opinions here.

Fingerpicking

2008-12-02T09:58:00.000+05:30

"US intelligence expert says Patil is incompetent" reads an article in an online website, which goes on to describe how the 'expert' found lapses in India's intelligence units.

a) Is this really the right time to be blaming anyone? (and this goes for the BJP as well whose esteemed LK Advani was out campaigning when the Prime Minister had called for an all-party crisis meeting last weekend) One thing that I really (seriously, no sarcasm) respect the Americans for is their unity and their humility in defeat and loss. After 9/11 there was no "it's his/her fault" flying around. Can't say the same for their intelligence experts though.

b) Incompetence is a terrible excuse, but it is far better than sheer indifference. "I told you so" is the current mantra of the Indian public & government to the U.S., whose adulterous love affair with Pakistan has kept it disturbingly blind to the groups that operate from within it. I am not saying anything against Pakistan in general. In the past three months I have befriended three young men from Pakistan and have become incredibly close to them. All I am saying is that there are elements which need to be weeded out. A fact which the U.S. refuses to see. Love is blind, after all.

c) Even if it is true that Tata or even Patil had some knowledge that an attack was imminent, what could they have really done. I have limited knowledge of what they knew and when, but picture being in the Secretary of Defense's shoes 30 minutes before 9/11 and being told that someone flying someplane is going to attack somewhere. I can't imagine what I would do in that situation. (But hey, we all know about them trigger happy rednecks now, don't we)

Even as I type this, blasts rip through the north-eastern state of Assam, not half a day's drive from my hometown and my parents.

Let the blaming stop. Let us remember that the real enemy is not the electorate or even the people who contest them, but we, the people, the public, who forget so soon. Let the rallies manifest not in shouts of anger in the streets of the Causeway but in the ballots of the next generation.

They have caught our attention. Now let them face our wrath.

All in Good Jest

Punchline

The Persistence of Hope

Olfactory

Paraphernalia

On Ragland Road

Facebook

100 years

Red Pill

Momentary Grasp of Treason

Once Around the Sun

Think Different

It Goes On

Bunk

Precipitation

Any Dream Will Do

Year's End

Of Little Princes

Christmas Lights

From one mortal soul to another

The Maker

Punchline 2

The Social Network

From Seth's Blog

Maurice Nagar

Second Hand News

Induction

Archives

When work gets to you,

Oneiros

Arithmetic Progression

Just in case life only happens once,

Of Inception in general and Ideas in particular

Every Grain of Sand

Black WIdow

Get your geek on

on failures, letting down friends, being let down, and misery in general

Adventures

Otherside

Mandatum

Friendly Fools

The last laugh

Ash Wednesday

Of ageing (ungracefully)

From the desk of T J Eckleburg

Invictus

Love is Noise

Anno Domini

Watchmaker

Someday...

Punchline

Hope are there

The last place may not be the last

Bootlegs

Place not your pearls before swine

Keeping the doctor away

It's been awhile

City of Joy

REM

3 a.m.

Dog Eat Dog

Heroes

The drawbacks of liquid face soap...

Tiny Vessels

Tenderloin, anyone? (Vegetarians beware)

...Long live the King!

Till geekdom come (boredom's already here)

Graduation Rations

The Lasting

...and thanks for all the fish

The 4th Sense

Holi Hai

"The Luxury of Grief"

Darkly Dreaming Dexter looking through a Scanner Darkly on a Dark & Stormy Night

Did we really vote for THESE guys?

What's a Unicorn?

Go Ape

Mocha Dreams

The Departed

Job Descriptions