Desipience

Upsilamba

2010-07-07T10:55:00.005+05:30

My first memory of life in Flat No. 704 is of borrowing Cousin B's camera for taking a picture of the view from my balcony. With me in the foreground, of course. As one Vincent van Gogh would concur, self-portraits are no mean task and my dozen odd attempts were all in vain, (quite like the ones I would make in the years to come) much to the umbrage of Cousin B. Those were the days of the good old Kodak film rolls, you see- digital cameras and the luxury of the delete button were still some way in the future.

In the years hence, Bangalore and Abhishek have made way for Bengaluru and Dela respectively. The population of the city has doubled and so has my weight. Even in the midst of all that, the view from my balcony is as magnificent as ever, my car-park is still the most popular cricket pitch in all of Jayanagar, my love affair with peanut butter continues and Shanti Sagar still makes the best Gobi Manchurian in the world. So much has happened over the last thirteen years. And yet, so little has changed.

The last two months have seen me bid adieu to Bahrain and Roorkee, those two wonderfully bizarre towns I called home for nine memorable years. Bidding goodbye to the lives I led there is another matter, but all in due time.

For now, I'll just look forward to Bangalore and the deluge of nostalgia and hope that comes with it.

Of toys and stories

2010-06-28T14:06:00.006+05:30

When I was in school, I always vaguely loathed the way teachers would try to reveal hidden 'layers' within a book. To me a book was about its plot and its characters- all the alleged symbolism and allegory that people were forever finding in books was more accidental than deliberate. Then again, in high school I believed all sorts of things that turned out to be untrue, starting with my belief that a moustache would suit my countenance perfectly.

I left the theater in 1995 after seeing the original Toy Story feeling strangely moved. I was only seven and probably didn't know who Tom Hanks was, never mind Tim Allen and Joan Cusack, but I did know – at least on a basic level of storytelling – that it was fantastic. As you age, nostalgia often has to compensate for quality (or lack thereof) in your perception of the books and movies you once loved. Suddenly Small Wonder isn't as hilarious as it once was. Tinkle is monotonous. Tom and Jerry is plain silly.

Toy Story, oddly, has always been the exception to the aforesaid rule. It is, perhaps, another of those works of art with 'layers'- there is more to it than meets the eye. There is a scene in the new instalment where Woody, Buzz and co. end up having to choose between a life of luxury at the day-care centre and a less-enjoyable one in the place they once called home. I have an odd feeling a large chunk of the largely-expatriate audience was reminded of the choices they had made themselves. Or perhaps that's just my month-long stay outside India getting to me.

The allegories don't end there. There is another scene that seemed straight out of 1984. And another that smacked of Holden Caulfeld-esque cynicism. Toy Story 3 is, in many ways, the most complete movie ever made.

Or perhaps I am just reading too much into a Pixar flick where toys talk, fall in love and do lots of other crazy stuff.

Smoke through a keyhole

2010-06-10T20:37:00.013+05:30

Anonymity is a luxury. I came home little over a fortnight back looking forward to spending the month in the snug embrace of my quilt, with the World Cup and Mum's coffee to keep me awake. Earlier today, I received a call from my old school requesting me to turn up and share my two fils' worth on IIT, the universe and everything, being one of the most prolific students to emerge from the narrow corridors of the Indian School Bahrain. Their words, not mine. As it turns out, I am something of a legend in these parts, with a fan base comparable to that of Shakira. Or, for that matter, Puneet Singh Jaggi.

One of the reasons I come home as rarely as I do is the confrontation with the past that it inevitably results in. Reminders of the estrangement of my past and present selves await me at every turn. A Westlife CD here, a Full House poster there- my search for answers only yields more questions. Is there no part of us that survives the irrevocable march of time? If change was indeed a good thing, wouldn't nostalgia lose its purpose? Are the things we do and the people we like truly a reflection of who we are underneath? Do our inner and outer selves ever match up? Is life really worth all the effort it takes to survive? What exactly makes it worth it? Why ask useless questions? How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky? Who is John Galt?

Late edit: Six hours after I typed this post out, I found this.

The Last Stand

2010-05-12T04:39:00.009+05:30

Destiny has joined the ranks of God, milk chocolate and Cristiano Ronaldo in the elite list of things I can't make up my mind about. Far too often have I seen the plans and schemes of men go up in flames without rhyme or reason. I suppose life's course is determined more by the choices we don't get to make than the ones we do.

For the first time in a while, I went to the Ganga Canteen for a snack today. Friends and acquaintances from the gaon were greeted with 'what-ho's' and smiles. Respectively. Somewhere during the drill, a batch-mate was kind enough to point out that the trip might just as well be my last. I have reached that stage in the life of an R-Lander, I suppose. A glass of Ice Tea, a game of football, a walk in the rain- just about anything I do seems to make me wonder if Fate has another round written against my name.

I am eight hours away from my last end-sem as a student of Electrical Engineering. A wiser man would probably have hit the books ages ago, but the occasion is one that ought to be savoured, I decide, and take a jaunt down memory lane instead. Barring a miracle in CAT 2011 (or 2012, for that matter), this will be the last test I will be sitting through for some time to come. Hardly something I'll miss too sorely, of course, but this will also mark, in more ways than one, the end of the road, to borrow a phrase from this wonderful song.

Times like these almost invariably make me relive that fateful day four years ago when a series of curious coincidences saw Electrical-Roorkee make that all-important leap over Engineering Physics-Mumbai on my preferrence list.

'To think, all this was so close to never happening. This life was so close to never happening.'

Doldrums

2010-05-02T07:22:00.008+05:30

It rained last night, albeit briefly. I possess what I am told is the quintessential Cancarian temperament- a susceptibility to mood swings and momentary lapses of reason. There are days when I am all sunshine and laughter and then there are others when my irritability tires even me out. Nothing reverts me to my cheery best as unfailingly as the rains- a consequence, presumably, of spending four long years in water lorry-infested Chennai.

I woke up this morning promptly at the stroke of eight, defiantly resisting the ever-alluring alternative of the snooze button. The smell of wet earth still lingered in the air. Petrichor, I think, is the word for it. For once, I remembered to pour coffee powder into my filter (Yes, thank you PPT) just before I went to sleep. I set off for the mess, pleasantly surprised to be greeted by a reasonably edible meal of Maggi and corn flakes. Perfection, as one Chandler Muriel Bing would have put it.

And that precise moment was when any semblance of normalcy disappeared from my daily rote. As the rest of the world set off for departments and laboratories far and wide, I was confronted by that one question I have faced far too often this semester- 'now what?'

4-2, for the uninitiated, is the master-plan of the R-Land administration whereby students are put through four months of mind-numbing inactivity in an attempt to set right the sham that thesis projects have now become. The reasoning, presumably, is that students will eventually tire of stalking people on Facebook and will find the idea of a project appealing. Sound enough. The scheme, however, overlooks the one thing mankind can never have too much of- sleep.

For the fourth time this week, I sit down with a copy of Gone With The Wind, determined to do Ms. Mitchell justice this time around. The effort lasts all of forty three minutes, seven more than my last attempt. Mrs. Dalloway waits on my bookshelf, as do Freedom at Midnight and The Brothers Karamazov. My head, however, sinks into that familiar depression in my pillow, as I gradually give in to the whims of Lady Slumber. The clock on my bedside table reads 9.22 AM.

Empty Spaces

2010-02-15T00:22:00.014+05:30

Heaven knows I’m a hypersomniac of the first order. There are few things I enjoy more than slipping into the warm embrace of my quilt at the end of a hard (which, like everything else in the world, is a relative term) day’s work.

The same old routine was repeated this Friday. A high-octane Meta v Mech football game and a three-hour sermon on desh bhakti by a topless Salman Khan left me drained, physically and mentally. Somewhere between all that, I even managed to sit through Choreo’s bizarrely-named event (Courante, for those of you who care), if only for a few forgettable minutes. By the stroke of midnight, I had well and truly earned my right to a good night’s rest. Another day in the life of Dela had just reached its inevitable end.

It was at this fateful moment that Long Legs, The Horniest One and Benarasi Babu broke into my room. Yours truly was shaken out of a wonderful slumber and invited on a pilgrimage to the holy Kumbh. Left having to make a tough choice between my quilt and a place in heaven, I did the one thing any normal man in my place would have done- toss a coin. Alas, tails it was, and I was off on my way to Haridwar, knapsack on my back.

For some reason, pilgrimages inevitably evoke images of The Canterbury Tales in my mind. The latest expedition, though, was as distant from that historic journey as it could possibly be. Our bags had deserted us even before we set foot on the Holy Land. The police did all they possibly could to make our 5 kilometre journey seem like a marathon. Our shoe-string budget also meant that we would have to make do with a modest brunch of Coke and Kurkure. Nevertheless, true-believers that we were, we walked. We walked until our until muscles burned and our veins pumped battery acid. Then we walked some more.

A little past six PM yesterday, I was back in my bed, with more memories of the twenty-odd kilometre walk than the holy dip that it culminated in. Somewhere along the way, my sandals came apart after stubbornly holding their own in the face of so daunting a task for an entire day. I can barely feel my limbs at the moment. My neck is currently the only freely mobile part of my body. Touch wood. My laptop is busy gathering cobwebs amidst a stack of newspapers in one corner of my room, which means that Anita Nair's Good Night and God Bless is, for now, my sole source of entertainment. In the meantime, the Minion has been kind enough to remind me that the Mid Sems are less than a week away. As far as my BTP goes, the lesser said, the better.

On the brighter side, I will be heading to heaven at the end of all this.

Rhymes and reasons

2010-01-03T05:19:00.008+05:30

One of the few things I’m grateful to technology for is that it is possible in this day and age to fly four hours and land in a city where you can sit comfortably in your T-shirt and ogle all you like at East European girls tanning in the Arabian sun, which is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Paradise, in fact.

The problem with paradise is that it’s temporary: You don’t belong here and the neighbours are nobody you care to know, so it’s only blissful for a week or so. You’re in a country that depends on a dozen tombs built by men of another era out of a faith that you don’t share. You look around at the highway, the temples, the mausoleums, the curvy streets of houses, your hotel, you find nothing that would look out of place in your own hometown; which is exhilarating to some people but not to you. You expect the week-long trip to turn out to be another of those ordeals that fail to capture your imagination. And yet, it does.

Mankind is at its best when engaged in the endless heroic quest for whatever — truth, love, literary excellence, supremacy in tennis, a perfect 10 — and relaxation makes them dull. It’s true. Deep down, we’re all hunters. It is the pursuit of goals that keeps us alive- an eternal hunger that feeds on itself to push us towards whatever it is that we have set out to achieve.

The fundamental religion of most of mankind is the faith that God has revealed Himself to us and not to the non-believers. Our faith is the one God chose and so if we vanquish the other tribes and rain fire and destruction on them, we’re only carrying out God’s Will.

Now, eating pickled cheese under the Saharan sun, I am sliding into hedonistic pantheism, slouching down the Nile towards Luxor, on a quest to make my parents and brother happy until the money runs out and we regain our senses and head home.

Back in R-Land, as I go about the unenviable ritual of chronologically arranging my grade sheets, I realize that it is faith, or rather the lack of one, that lies at the heart of the downward spiral I have been on. I suppose that is what growing up is all about- the gradual loss of faith, be it in a Higher Force, the system, and eventually, yourself.

The 31st of December has a delightful habit of catching me on the wrong foot. On this occasion, much to my own surprise, I find myself on the banks of the Nile, observing the remains of a long defunct civilization. In the run-up to D-day, H-hour, a fancy sound-and-lights show has been set up in Giza, in an attempt to extract a few precious pounds from an overtly-enthusiastic crowd. Five minutes pass, and the event gradually begins to arouse my interest, as it impressively takes on the arduous task of condensing Egypt's three thousand year history to a forty-five minute show.

The show makes up for what it lacks in style with substance. A spectacular flare of red and yellow goes up in the sky to depict the accession of Khafren and the dawn of the Age of Pharoahs. Shadow-figures turn up in the middle of the sky, clutching non-existent bricks in a hapless attempt to depict the construction of the Pyramids. Quite aptly, Beethoven’s String Quartet No.16 is played in the background. ‘Es muss sein’, a voice bellows, ‘ja, es muss sein.’

‘It must be. Yes, it must be.’

'When' Diagrams

2009-12-19T20:08:00.004+05:30

Bookstores always bring out the worst in me. An hour spent leafing through novels and comic books well beyond my modest budget is all it takes to send my vows of austerity up in flames, leaving me in a Gollum-esque trance that I am fast growing used to. I even devise a few 'get-rich-quick’ schemes on the journey back home. Thankfully, good sense and laziness have prevailed, and my plans of robbing Nescafe haven’t seen the light of day. Yet.

Rummaging through that wonderfully haphazard dump of paperbacks that is Midland Book Store, my eyes fell on a yellowing copy of Tom Sawyer. The jaunt down memory lane it incited was, perhaps, inevitable; for Mark Twain's magnum opus was the first book I’d ever read that wasn’t illustrated by Anant Pai. I spent a good portion of the next hour in the Kids section, fondly flipping through Enid Blytons and Robert Arthurs. Beyond a point, I don’t think it is possible to look back at any book without being transported to the world we lived in when we first read it and recalling the inchoate hopes and dreams that guided our lives then. Books, movies, songs- every experience in the world is partly controlled by an imperceptible parameter of time, what I plan to call the ‘when’ factor when I eventually publish a treatise on the subject.

I saw ‘Wake Up Sid’ a fortnight ago. Much to my own surprise, I ended up liking the movie. For once, Ranbir Kapoor’s dressing sense didn’t make my eyes bleed; worse, I even liked a few of his T-shirts. Miracles, indeed, shall never cease.

And so it goes

2009-12-07T22:03:00.007+05:30

The Corniche on King Faisal Highway remains my favourite promenade in the world, with Thomason Marg and Nanda Talkies Road filling up the second and third spots respectively. The place is Bahrain's answer to the Bandstands and Palm Beaches of the world- one of the few saving graces for the otherwise barrenArabian landscape. Stretching from the Bait-al-Quran, a 6 storey-museum dedicated to the Quran, to the swank Financial Towers, the path is almost symbolic of the one the island country has taken in the last three decades on its road to development.

It has been seven years since the last time I took a walk down the Corniche. What was once a daily ritual is now no more than another bookmark in the yellowing pages of fading memory. Seven years. I was another person back then. I was even called another name by my friends and relatives. In all the million changes in me between then and now, the Corniche still remains just the way it was. I suppose we all have our own special spots in the world- places that serve as reminders of all that we've lost to the unforgiving march of time. The Corniche is my spot.

Faith is never a matter of choice. For some of us, it is the mere accident of birth that determines our eisegeses of heaven and hell. Then there are others who believe that nothing in our life follows a pre-ordained script, that all stories are essentially a series of coincidences. And yet, there are junctures in all our lives that even the most skeptical of us looks back at and wonders if the hand of a greater power was indeed at work. Sooner or later, we all realize that things we once took for chance were really inevitable or, as the great Danny Boyle would have put it, written. I have reached that point now, as I stand before a board adorned with notices of a strange shade of pink, still firmly in the clutches of unemployment.

Two weeks from now, I will return to Bahrain, with or without gainful employment. No matter how horribly the next two weeks pan out, life can never be too bad as long as I can still take walks along the Corniche.

Feline Fits

2009-11-23T21:43:00.008+05:30

An estimated 2.41 lakh candidates are said to have registered for CAT this year, and yours truly had hoped to be the only one in that vast expanse of humanity with a naught in the 'effort put in' column. You know, beginner’s luck and all that tosh. Sadly, The Incredible Bulk’s stout defiance has meant that we will be sharing the honours. While four years in R-Land have made the otherwise daunting task of turning up for an examination blank appear fairly routine, to repeat the feat in the second biggest event in the life of an Indian kid is, even by the high standards I’ve set for myself, quite daring. It isn’t without regret that I narrate my tale, though. The stubborn refusal to hit the books that took flight on the lofty perches of ‘I won’t join the IIMs even if I make the cut’ has now fallen into the more familiar depths of ‘if only I’d started studying earlier.’ Not for the first time, the Department of Electrical Engineering has done all it possibly coiuld to make a nuisance of itself, by lining up tests right till the end of the month.

There is a Tamil proverb that compares marriage to a poisoned confection of some sort dangling just beyond the reach of a thousand hungry apes. The ones that manage to get their hands on the sweetmeat die of poisoning, while the ones that don’t die of starvation. Oh wait, I think it was a Kannada proverb. Either way, for some reason, the analogy always reminded me of the frenzy that surrounds entrance examinations in our billion-strong nation.

I was catching up with Smelly Cat the other day. There was a time when we were as close as two straight males could possibly be, oft drawing comparisons to two peas in the metaphorical pod. In recent years, though, the distance between R-Land and Pilani has erected a wall too high for GTalk or Facebook to scale. My chaapos are his treats, and my fokiaap his studgiri. Five minutes into the conversation, I knew that things could never be the same between us ever again. What started off as a friendly chit-chat on life, the universe and everything gradually turned into a drab monologue on Artificial Intelligence- my rare contributions coming in the form of grunts and monosyllables. I was willing to forgive the guy this one indulgence though. His internship, after all, was at MIT where he has a Ph.D lined up under the same professor. Yes, the MIT, where the M stands for Massachusetts and not Madras.

Ironically enough, our last conversation was in June 2006- a good portion of which was spent consoling him for not making the cut in the JEE. Those were the days, indeed. Throughout high school, I saw JEE as a magical doorway of some sort-all you had to do was clear three tests and the rest of your life would open up in ways you could scarcely imagine. Four years hence, here I am- without a job and with as much a chance of making it to the IIMs as Ibu Hatela.

I can only hope that the IIMs are just as overrated.

P.S: Any comments containing the words ‘sour grapes’ shall be promptly deleted.

P.P.S: It was only after I typed out the entire post that I came across this. Stole the words from my mouth, in more ways than one. That said, I still can’t picture Madhavan and that Sukhi guy as college students. I can always make an exception for Aamir Khan, though.

Bah, humbug

2009-10-17T12:22:00.003+05:30

You can’t help but wonder how your life could possibly get any worse when you spend Diwali all by yourself mechanically swallowing an insipid breakfast of oat-porridge and milk. I have turned off my mobile phone and shut myself indoors, in the hope that solitude will provide some sort of solace. It doesn’t, and for the fourth consecutive year in a row, Diwali is spent longing for home.

My first trip to the ‘Pataaki Bazaar’ in Jayanagar came two months after my sixth birthday. Grandpa, a far cry from his usual grouchy self, decided it was time he introduced his grandson to the thrills of atom bombs, rockets and bijlis. True to our TamBram roots, we stayed off 12th Main Road to avoid the ghastly sight of KP Butcher Shop (Estd. 1932) and the lambs and goats that hung from its ceilings . The market was no more than a kilometre away from where we lived, though the aforementioned detour nearly doubled the distance.

The trip soon became an annual ritual- year after year, Grandpa and I would set off to the market on the eve of Diwali, with the day’s Hindu for company. While I mentally conjured a shopping list of sorts, Grandpa spent much of the journey cavilling about the downward spiral the country was on. For its part, the Indian political establishment seldom let him down, with one scam or the other taking up much of The Hindu’s dull frontpage time and again.

On D-day, every kid in the neighbourhood gathered at the courtyard with his booty. There was a lot of pride at stake, with each kid vying for top spot in the race for arms. Once the fireworks began, though, there wasn’t a sound to be heard apart from the booms of Sivakasi-made gunpowder. For the next two hours, one hundred eyes looked up to the skies in unison admiring the spectacular barrage of rockets, aerial bombs and whatnot. The rigmarole of daily life somehow seemed to take a backseat for those two wonderful hours. Even Grandpa didn’t seem too worried about the future of Indian democracy any more.

The rockets will light up the Bangalore sky once again tonight. For the twelfth successive Diwali, I will be elsewhere.

To be or knot to be

2009-10-04T08:34:00.007+05:30

It has been close to a month and a half since I last posted. The 40 odd days that have transpired between ‘Fifty and counting’ and now have been unusually eventful- at once both dream and nightmare for a blogger. That is one of the downsides of blogging, I suppose- you are prone to the odd pangs of guilt every time you let a potential-post pass. There was a time in my early blogging days when I maintained a blue scribbling pad where I jotted down every anecdote I wanted to post but didn’t. As the years went by, sanity was restored and the pad became another speck in the vast pile of garbage that lies beneath my bed. Had I still maintained it, though, I would have found that almost all my ‘nearly entries’ post-July were centred on the same theme- marriage.

There was a time when I felt quite strongly about all matters concerning the holy knot. Strongly against, of course. My four years in R-Land, sadly, have left me more confused than ever. While weddings, matrimonial websites and arranged marriages continue to baffle and repulse me (yes, thank you Sheldon Cooper), quotes such as this one have left me convinced that society is better off married than single.

The wedding bells back home will be kept busy this 2010, with three of my cousins set to reach the magic figure of 26. The wedding halls have been chosen, the outfits purchased and even the gifts decided- all that remains, of course, is the bride. I quite enjoy the run-up to The Great Indian Wedding. Aunts and grannies who seldom check their mailboxes suddenly look up Iyengar girls on BharatMatrimony.com and Facebook with a dexterity that would make HHH hang his head in shame. Feminists who spend most of their desolate lives lamenting the rampant voyeurism in our country can be found looking up profile pictures and passing comments that range from the thinly-veiled (“This one has a big nose.”) to the blunt (“She looks like a slut.”) While it’s all good fun watching others having their soulmates picked by an army of chittis, athais and paatis, picturing myself at the receiving end of the ritual does send a chill down the spine.

Old Man K’s betrothal was held earlier this month, cruelly reminding yours truly and the iPot that our own big nights might be less than half a decade away. In the meantime, The Pink Prophet added to the entire clamour with his prediction that I will one day end up getting killed by my better half. Oh wait, I think it was the other way around- I’ll end up killing her.

Either way, 26 seems far more daunting than 21.2.

Fifty. And Counting.

2009-08-10T02:00:00.015+05:30

Mambakkam is a sleepy hamlet two hundred kilometers south of Chennai, smack in the heart of what was once the Pallava Empire. The five-hundred strong settlement is an Indian village straight out of a Bharatiraja movie- the idyllic picture complete with a large pond adorned with lilies of an enchanting shade of cream. Our own bungalow was a pleasant yellow- the only concrete structure in the vicinity apart from the Pillayar Kovil to be allowed the luxury of paint. The house was in a mesmerizing state of ruin, perennially sporting a captivating fragrance that was a fusion of agarbattis, moss and cow-dung.

My favourite part of the house was an unusually long verandah, no wider than a couple of metres. The walls on both sides were lined by portraits and photo-frames from over the ages haphazardly nailed on the bluish-white walls- a picture of Grandma’s wedding ceremony and another of her father's graduation stood cheek by jowl. There was a haunting feeling, a sense of defying death, perhaps, about those fifty-odd black-and-white images that never quite left me.

I have always found photography fascinating. It is strange how it only takes a piece of paper and some fancy equipment to freeze a moment in time, sealed from the drills of age and death that we mortals are put through. Summer after summer, I'd catch Granny spending hours looking up, misty-eyed, at the frames and smiling at the unseeing eyes; taking her own sweet jaunts down memory lane. Occasionally, I'd even spot a tear or two. Having seventy years of your life stare down at you from a wall can be a daunting experience, I suppose.

True to its coastal location, the rains haunt Mambakkam with a numbing regularity. Yet, strangely enough, the village is caught unawares every single time, welcoming each spurt as if it were the first. Nothing could have prepared the hamlet for the cyclone that struck it late last year, though. I always thought the telephone poles the Government installed all over the village in the late 90's were an anachronism- the only eyesores in an otherwise perfectly medieval setting. The poles did little to improve their standing in my eyes when one of them was uprooted by the cyclone and landed right in the middle of my ancestral home, taking with it the verandah and the images and stories it withheld.

Much to my own disbelief, it has been fifty posts since I first decided to encroach on a few megabytes of webspace (two posts were subsequently deleted, if you're wondering why the numbers on the right don't add up). As clichéd as it might sound, the last forty-nine posts have all, to varying degrees, been steps on that long journey to self-discovery. I have often been asked why I wrote- not always out of exasperation, I must add. A few even ventured explanations of their own; the Bulk's 'Glory-Blogger' theory undoubtedly the most popular of the lot. I, for one, believe the asnwer lay somewhere in that verandah. I have always felt an inexplicable sense of warmth while wallowing in nostalgia- that huge void inside slips into oblivion, for a few wonderful moments. I think my posts have all, in one way or another, been patchy attempts to recreate my beloved verandah. Some day, I will look back at all this. And smile.

Senescence

2009-08-03T02:42:00.007+05:30

I have always found the gulf between theory and practice quite annoying. On paper, I could write ballads on the backhand- from Steffi Graf’s one-handed sliced backhand to Safin’s perfectly controlled two-hander. Yet, when I stood holding a racquet for the very first time on R-Land’s concrete courts, I skied twelve consecutive balls over the 20-foot high fence and onto the adjacent football ground. In another sport, my strokes would have been lauded by all and dubbed homeruns, sixers and whatnot. Tennis, sadly, has never been the most logical of games.

Over the years, many a wide-eyed kid has called me his role model and thanked me no end for inspiring him to achieve whatever little he managed to achieve in his miserable life. Without a hint of sarcasm, mind you. The mantle of the role model fell on my shoulders again that forgettable Friday evening. A small crowd had gathered around to watch the barrage of projectiles that I was sending over the hedge with unerring accuracy. ‘Look! That guy is in 4^th year and he’s still worse than us,’ I heard one of the kids whisper, clutching his racquet with a newfound vigour. I had half a mind to give the bloke a sermon on geriatric wisdom and how tennis wasn’t one of the many fields it encompassed. I decided against it though, lest the R-word be brought up all over again.

You know you are older than you'd like to be when your playlist has more songs of John Denver than Nirvana. I turned twenty one a fortnight ago. It feels like seventy one, to quote the words Darth Canine used on his twenty-first. It is a strange thing to say, but for the first time in life, I feel terribly old. It isn't the mature, coming-of-age old. It's more a nostalgic, 'those were the days' brand of old. More's the pity.

As I languidly empty the contents of my sixth cup of coffee in as many hours, the matkas in the neighbouring canopy are busy planning their campaigns for the impending elections. The PM household is going about doing their thing. A long-haired fresher is humming Linkin Park’s latest, twirling his fingers into a range of convoluted positions while he did so. A couple is recreating a scene straight out of a chicklit novel- giggles exchanged, hands entwined, sweet nothings whispered- the whole nine yards.

Ever the silent spectator, I watch the motley crowd go about their business, constantly reminded of that timeless dialogue from Lethal Weapon- ‘I’m too old for this stuff.’

The Story

2009-07-14T22:18:00.007+05:30

"Some people pass through your life and you never think about them. And there are some you think about, and wonder "whatever happened to them"? Dentist, maybe. Gossip columnist. No - divorce lawyer. Some you wonder if they ever wondered what happened to you. And then there are those... you wish you never had to think about again. But you do."

I suppose there are days in all our lives that we look back at and wonder if the cruel parting of ways with the quilt first thing in the morning was worth the trouble. Lazy chumps like my brother probably have them practically all the time. Though not the most industrious soul alive, I treat my past less derisively and strive to find a silver lining in even the gloomiest of days. Yesterday was one of those rare occasions when there wasn't one.

It was a pleasant Sunday afternoon- the sun was up, the birds chirped and all seemed well. I left for the CCD on Lloyds' Road for my daily dose of caffeine only to run into Miss Muffet. 'Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine,' I exclaimed, only to be condescendingly reminded by the waiter that neither was the place a gin joint nor was it mine. Bemoaning the drop in the IQ of waiters in these parts, I jostled my way past a horde of coochie-cooing couples and greeted the lady.

If she was even remotely pleased by this chance meeting, she concealed it brilliantly. Miss Muffet seemed to have put on a few pounds since we'd last met, but, in retroispect, telling her so was probably not the best way to kick start our tête-à-tête.

Strange really. Ever since the time I first set sight on Metro Goldwyn Mayer's roaring lion, Hollywood had drilled into me a notion that a meeting of ex-es was a sight to behold- you know, old sparks flying and all that rot. That fateful afternoon, though, the darned sparks didn't so much as budge. To cut a long story short, my huge hopes for the summer have come to all but nothing. I shall return to R-Land later this week with my feet firmly entrenched in bachelorhood, perhaps firmer than they have ever been.

Oh well. Que sera sera.

Getting the BALS Rolling

2009-07-03T19:14:00.004+05:30

Anyone standing beside Delhi's renowned India Gate at dusk that evening would be forgiven for thinking that he was in a scene straight out of a Hollywood period drama- Peter Jackson's latest epic, prehaps. The weather was more forgiving than it had been all month, with temperatures hovering around the 30 degree mark. Yes, touch wood, fingers crossed and all that. Even amidst the chaos of traffic, dust and street-hawkers, the sunset was quite a spectacle. As was the case with most sunsets, I soon pictured myself walking into it with the lady of my life. On this occasion, it was Ana Ivanovic. 'God is the greatest director of them all', declared Dreamy Joe, cruelly ending my wondeful reverie, 'and the capital his maginificent canvas.' 'Nothing wrong with the sets or the director', I replied, 'but he could have done a better job picking his actors.'

I'll board the Tamilnadu Express four days from now, bringing down the curtains on a fairly eventful stint at the capital. Many of my notions about the city and its people have altered considerably, though not always for the better. For one thing, the place is hotter than I'd imagined. Nevertheless, I have spent a month amidst Delhi-ites without losing my sanity, which is a fairly pleasant surprise. One thing that i have learnt is that if you leave logic and etiquette by your bedside table, Delhi is a wonderful place to live in.

'Lodhi Road isn't actually a road,' the Boss informed me a month ago, 'it's a locality. To get there, you'll have to take a bus to Sarai Kale Khan, which isn't a Sarai, but a bus terminus', the conversation strangely reminescent of a scene from one of my favourite movies ('Tum jo ho woh tum nahi ho, tum woh ho. Woh jo hai, woh wo nahi hai, woh tum ho. Main jo hoon kya main hoon?' Does it ring a bell?)

Over the course of the past two months, many have wondered what I did at work. A couple even asked me if I took a pillow along. Flustered, I have decided to put you, dear reader, through my average working day- a day in the life of Dela, if you like.

7.15: The alarm rings. Put it on snooze and continue sleeping.

7.20: It rings again. Slam it on the table to see if that makes it stop.

8.10: Wake up.

8.50: Stand in the sun waiting for that blighted 323.

10.00: Try to come up with a credible excuse for turning up an hour late.

10.15: Realize that noone really cares.

10.30: Start Firefox and open 3 tabs- Gmail, Facebook and sciencedirect.com

10.45: Set off for a cup of coffee, hoping to run into an HR girl I'd been eyeing for a while.

10.48: Find noone there.

11.30: Boss walks in asking for a report I'd been assigned two days ago. I start talking about his tie instead, buying myself a few precious minutes.

12.15: Submit the report courtesy Messrs Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.

12.30: Another round of coffee. Still no sign of the HR Girl.

2.15: Lunch time. Walk to the cafeteria with my colleagues only to find Rajma Rice and Aloo Zeera on the menu.

2.18: Pretend to receive a phone call and slip away to Eatopia.

2.23: Gorge on the best fusilli ever made by man.

3.10: The boss walks in with another assignment. Once again, the conversation turns to his ruddy tie.

4.05: To the coffee machine again. HR Girl is there this time, putting forth her two pence-worth on the Rupee-$ rate, how it had to stabilize around 47 for an optimal exchange-rate, export advantages and all that jazz. My opinion is sought. The only 47 I know is the bus that got me here from Andrews Ganj, I tell her. HR Girl leaves with a grunt. I continue to sip my cup of Georgia Gold, still wondering whether or not she got the joke.

5.15: One last cup of coffee and I'm off for the day. As they say, all in a day's work .

Meet the V's

2009-06-23T23:31:00.006+05:30

A long conversation with the Balding Successor on life, the universe and everything earlier today left me at my pensive best. As I set about the task of setting right the many wrongs of the world, I couldn’t help but wonder how much lovelier a place the world would be if I’d inherited more from my kin than my family’s trademark wavy hair and a double chin. For over a decade now, the M family has marvelled in unison at how a ToI-reading cynic was born into a perfectly perfect TamBram family such as theirs. To be fair though, the feeling is mutual. My idea of a day well-spent is one with at least hundred miles between me and the nearest kinsman. Exceptions do exist, of course, in the form of my brother, my parents and a smattering of cousins, uncles and aunts from here and there.

I have always had a soft corner for Sister V, though. For one thing, she makes the best vengaaya sambar this side of the Vindyas. For another, the V’s are officially my guardians for my stay at R-Land. As rosy as it might all seem, setting off for their abode in Mayur Vihar Phase-1 is hardly the lovey-dovey homecoming it might seem. Nothing comes easy in life- and certainly not vengaaya sambar.

I have not seen a leech till date and hope I never do. When people narrate their encounters with the horrid creature, I try to picture the person in the V’s living room longingly eyeing the door. The V’s have an uncanny sense of hospitality, you see. No one is allowed to leave their abode until he/she is left gasping for freedom. Pleas, excuses, alibis and lies are all nonchalantly dismissed by Old Man V, capped off with one of his trademark apothegms. “Chandni Chowk is no longer the place it once was.” “Birthday parties are for toddlers.” “Weddings are for 30 year olds.” “Movies are for retards.” I once even claimed I wanted to visit the local temple only to be told by Old man V that temples in the North weren’t worth visiting, before setting off on his own version of the Canterbury Tales.

After delaying the inevitable for a month, I finally gave in and promised Sister V that I’d join them for dinner tonight. Reluctantly, I stand outside the Sector 19 telephone Exchange patiently awaiting the arrival of my beloved 323. I find I'm so agitated, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it's the agitation only an imprisoned man can feel, an imprisoned man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I don’t make it across the border. I hope Old Man V forgets that he even had a nephew named Dela. I hope the buildings in Mayur Vihar Phase-1 are yellower than they were in my nightmares. I hope.

Bigger, Longer, Uncut

2009-06-04T16:09:00.006+05:30

Though hardly the haughty narcissist people often accuse me of being, I spend an unusual amount of time in front of the mirror. My average day begins with five whole minutes spent staring at my own visage, more often than not, analyzing my hairline with a deep sense of satisfaction. Considering that no male family member in living memory has crossed forty with his hairline intact, satisfaction could make way to a minor sense of triumph at having safely crossed the halfway mark if I chose to dwell on it. I don’t. Not today certainly. The battle wounds from the previous night’s momentary lapse of reason were still fresh and bare.

A rush of blood, an hour too many in the sun and I was off on a date with the nearest barber. ‘Cuting- Rs. 25; Shawing- Rs. 10’, the board declared in emphatic red text. I left the place twenty minutes later- some stubborn bargaining ensured that I was ‘cute’ and ‘shawen’ for as little as 30 bucks. I returned more than pleased with myself. And then it began. I still hadn't taken off my shoes. Even the aroma of the aftershave hadn’t yet died away completely. “What did you cut your hair with? A lawn mower?” enquired one. “Get yourself a native American head-dress,” suggested another.

More brickbats have followed over the course of the week. For my part, I still see nothing wrong with my haircut. We Tambis are simple folk, you see. Our mental faculties assess hair solely on a single parameter basis. It’s either long or it isn’t. My instructions to my barber too are plain and simple- "cut it short". The entire ’60 degrees from here, a furrow there, a ridge here' routine is well beyond me. The very profound, “Why is the world a wannabe?” springs to mind.

I always found it fascinating that values, opinions and habits accrued over an entire lifetime could change in little over a second, or, as one lovely song put it, dafatan. The KFC incident, the Thomso conversation, the walk down Nanda Talkies Road last winter- my life is littered with epiphanies. I had another later that night.

Everton played Chelsea in a fairly one-sided FA Cup final at the new Wembley. For the first time in a while, I caught aglimpse of one Marouane Fellaini. My hair shall never be taken lightly ever again, I decided.

Monkey see, monkey do

2009-05-08T13:08:00.011+05:30

The penultimate in the long list of schools I’ve attended had an hour a week dedicated to ‘personality development’. It was a sham; I doubt if any of our personalities developed a great deal during those sessions spent staring blankly at trees (soul-searching, they told us) in the cruel Madduland sun. Then again, it was a welcome break from the rigmarole of classes, 'slip' tests, assignments and whatnot. Plus the course was taken by this sprightly old man named Mr. Srinivasan who was nice enough to create corny nicknames for all 38 of us. He even carried along a jar of toffees to distribute during classes, so all was well. “Be yourself!” was one of Mr. Srinivasan’s many catchphrases, which was inevitably followed by a “You are unique!” in his trademark Tambi accent, with ‘n’ inevitably replaced by its huskier cousin (as in ‘ta tha da dha NA’).

Over the years, this is a dogma that has been thrown at me time and again by every counselor worth his salt. I, for one, never really bought the idea. I am prone to hero-worship; at times, even mimicry (like most other Cancarians, Wiki tells me). The entire concept of individuality is a myth floated around new-age self-help gurus and modern babajis. Role models, heroes, idols- what are all these but euphemisms for the human mind’s basic tendency to ape those around it? For all the talk of evolution, the sixth sense and all that garbage, a part of us still believes in dropping our hats simply because the hat-seller did so too.

I have had my share of heroes- Dad, Sachin Tendulkar, (Sir?)Ryan Giggs and, of course, Holden Caulfield. Even so, never has my urge to ape been exposed in all its filth and ugliness as it was during my first few months in R-Land. Which brings me, at long last, to today's lunch and why I’ll be telling my grandchildren about it many moons from now. Surdy Pop, Lefty, The Hairy Scouser, Bang-bang and The Decayed Canine sit before me as I devour another round of Dynasty’s heavenly Paneer Kali Mirch. Pulki and his Milan jersey, sadly, are conspicuous by their absence. For a few fleeting seconds, I am a wide-eyed freshman again- awestruck by the men(?) who now sit before me; keen to mimic everything they did- their mannerisms, their repartees; even their profanities seemed classy in an inexplicably adolescent way. The following spring reinstilled some semblance of wisdom in me. I began to see the Canine for the overtly-profane pseudo-haddu he truly was. Lefty and Bang-bang had their falls from grace following their failed attempts at ditching the Jedi and finding themselves a missus. Surdy, I strongly suspect, never forgave me for hitting his girlfriend with a paper plane on that ill-fated Bhawan Day.

Lunches like these will join a trillion others in my ‘Those-were-the-days’chronicles. As I wrestle with my third naan, I can’t help but reflect on the fact that what was once a fairly routine affair will now become a thing of the sepia-tinted past. I could probably snatch a dinner or two with a couple of them. All at once? The optimist in me asks me to focus on the paneer instead.

The halo that once surrounded them has faded away, the fascination is all but gone. And yet, the five (six, including Pulki) still remain special, each in a way of their own. With them gone, R-Land will be bereft of heroes; there’ll be no faces to look for at Nesci on a sultry free-afti, no rooms to crash for a late-night session of South Park. As mushy as it might sound, life just won’t be the same again.

There is no charm in growing old, I tell you.

Sweet dreams are made of these

2009-04-26T02:43:00.011+05:30

For all the fuss I make about my rejection of destiny, luck and all that jazz, my iconoclasm succeeds in eluding me in times of need. Pascal’s gambit, I suppose.

It was another of those Saturday afternoons. The ceremonial ablution had been completed, the watery dal swallowed and the Gmail account checked and re-checked. ‘Write editorial; Photocopy power systems notes; Prepare for instrumentation TS’ read the to-do list I’d super-glued to my wall earlier that day. They could all wait. Two more hours would have to be killed before the long overdue visit of the Two Moneymen. IPL it would be for now, I decided. Much to the delight of a good many of my darker brethren, the Deccan Chargers seemed poised for a mammoth score. Five minutes into my arrival, three wickets had fallen and 200 now seemed a distant dream. There. The minority Mumbai Indians crowd now looked at me with an added sense of respect. With Tendulkar dropping a sitter minutes ago, a new messiah was needed. And he was found in the long-forgotten corners of Azad Bhawan.

My rating further soared an hour later. Tendulkar got Mumbai off to a decent start, with Duminy and Dhawan still to come. However, a five minute spell saw the three men throw away their wickets cheaply and put Mumbai seemed all but beaten. As luck would have it, it was precisely during those five blighted minutes that I chose to make the long trip to Nesci for a cup of coffee- my fifth of the day. “How could you do this to us?” exclaimed one distraught supporter. A few Harbhajan swings and misses sealed Mumbai’s fate. It was a lost cause now- even my presence could do little to alter the course of the match. The minority Mumbai crowd was left heartbroken, though my promises of staying rooted to my seat for every Indians’ game for the rest of the tournament lifted their spirits a fair bit.

The rain-gods were my next target. I prayed for the Chennai-Kolkata match to be washed out, to save me the trouble of reasoning with Cautley's bonehead of a canteen-wallah. They duly obliged. It was my day all right.

Nothing, though, could have braced me for the next forty five minutes. I gave the first half of the United-Spurs game a miss, choosing to attend The Two Moneymen’s generous treat at CCD instead. 2-0 down, read the scoreline on my return to Azad. “I hate saying this but my hope is thinning with each passing game,” I texted the Maddu Minion. Again, my arrival turned things around in a manner that I hadn’t imagined possible even in the wildest of my wild dreams.

A superhuman performance from Wayne Rooney ensured that Heurelho Gomes’ goal was breached five times in the next forty-five minutes. 5-2, the final score.

Liverpool, Juventus, Bayern Munich 1999, Tottenham 2001, Everton 2007, Aston Villa 2009, Tottenham 2009. The catalogue of great United comebacks has entered another chapter. Football, bloody hell!

P.S: Another football post. Apologies, Al.

Monday Morning Blues

2009-04-20T03:47:00.007+05:30

I have always been a huge fan of liquor adverts. McDowell’s and its uber-lame ‘make-it-large’ series apart, most breweries come up with fantastic stuff to coerce the teetotalling millions into giving their principles a break. My all-time favourite is the Royal Challenge advert that was aired in the late ‘90s- the one where a guy practices his golf on a flight. He pulls off a fabulous putt and looks around hoping for applause, only to find his co-passengers in various stages of stupor. The world would be a far more wonderful place if only you could somehow pick your audience for each moment- you scratch your nose and every pair of eyes at Nesci looks on in disgust; later the same day, you score a stunning volley from 15 yards out with only the hapless goalkeeper and a couple of defenders in attendance.

I had my Royal Challenge moment earlier tonight, a tête-à-tête that I would have liked all and Kondy to overhear. It had all the makings of a highly forgettable conversation- I was into the last few minutes of a highly forgettable weekend, United had just lost to Everton and HOG and his threats of a back were still looming large on the horizon. I was hardly in the mood for any human contact, let alone three halfwits that proudly called themselves ‘True-Blues’. The next thirty minutes were a pleasant surprise- a reconfirmation of my constant accusation of Chel$ki being the embodiment of all things ugly in the beautiful game.

I never thought I could ever come to loathe anything more than Tutti-Frutti ice-cream and Liverpool FC. Then again, for all our hostility, there is an undeniable undercurrent of mutual respect in the Manc-Scouse rivalry. With Chel$ki, though, it is plainly a case of pure, unadulterated hatred. Strange, indeed, that only eight years ago, I eagerly looked forward to our trips to Stamford Bridge. Though never a fan, I really enjoyed watching the likes of Zola, Gronkjaer and Gudjohnsen play. Along came Abrahamovic with his oil. Chelsea would never be the same again. Nor would the Chelsea supporter. With the arrival of a bottomless bank account and an all-new squad, a new Chelsea supporter was born- one who did not mind the drab football Mourinho’s men played week after week as long as they brought (bought?) the silverware home. A Chelsea fan who turned up well in advance for the United-Porto game but leisurely sipped the Azad canteen’s heavenly mango shake fifteen minutes into his team’s own quarterfinal against Liverpool. One who spent hours cooking up lame Gtalk status messages, all on the recurrent theme of ‘I hate Man. United’ (Try this for creativity- ‘Roses are red, violets are blue; whatever you say, I’ll say F-U M.U.). A Blue who did not care how shamelessly Drogba dived as long as he won the all-important penalty. A Stamford Bridge where all in attendance believed that the end justified the means, no matter how many careers were ruined along the way.

Tonight’s result left me gutted. Fingers will be raised as they indeed should be. Everton were by far the hungrier of the two sides. While Moyes rattled off instructions to his players minutes before the shootout, Fergie seemed to be asking Macheda what flavor of ice-cream he wanted for dinner. Even so, the kids did us proud; our youth squad tore apart the side that stands sixth on the league table, with nothing to show for it. The situation I faced was a hopeless one, though. How do you explain the importance of a youth academy to three ‘die-hard’ Chelsea fans? How do you make them understand that not every club bought all its players from West Ham and some still believed in grooming home-grown talent? How do you tell them that every player started off at a youth academy, gained experience, peaked and turned thirty before joining a club like Chelsea? Exasperated, I tried another argument. I asked them about Maniche, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Steve Sidwell and dozens of other talented players who were bought at the prime of their careers, only to be discarded a year or two later, no more than shadows of the players they were on arrival at the Bridge. ‘What have you got to say about Andriy Shevchenko?’ I asked them. ‘Or Carlo Cuducini?’ ‘Just three words,’ replied True Blue-I. ‘Manchester United sucks.’

I rest my case.

There and back again

2009-04-09T17:52:00.007+05:30

The first cries of the pani puri vendors announce the break of dawn. The Arabian Sea glistens in all its glory once again. Pigeons and gulls fly over us and further inland. The sun couldn’t seem to make up its ruddy mind whether to shine in all its cynical glory or let the cool breezes endure. The distant silhouette of the Gateway of India is soon surrounded by specks of human bodies. The auto and rickshaw wallahs arrive in the hope of an early customer. The beggars pick up their rags and rehearse their heart-wrenching wails. The eunuchs are up, going around doing whatever it is that they do. Another day in the life of the world’s greatest city has just begun.

It has been quite a journey. Forty eight hours ago, I was in R-Land trying to make a dim-witted hexagenarian see reason. With us getting richer by 75k (with a fancy 4' by 2' cheque to prove it) and a mail from the Tatas heaping an undue amount of praise on us, the milk of human kindness would rise like a tide in the old man, we thought. All that remained was mere paperwork- he would sign the blighted application and be done with it, perhaps with a few words of wisdom- a ritual men his age can’t seem to do without. None of that happened, though. Except the homily with the words of wisdom, of course (“You're still young. Many big opportunities will come your way. And not all of them will clash with your examinations. Har! Har! Har!”) Far from amused, I set off anyway, deciding to do a “Screw you guys, I’m goin’ home.” The last word, of course, has no place in the present context.

Three uneventful rides (aboard a bus, flight and an auto-rickshaw respectively) found us at the hallowed gates of the Taj Mahal Palace. As embarrassing as it might sound, this was my first stay in a 5-star hotel. I have flown first class only once in all my life, and that was also on a ride to the Schiphol when the KLM officials were kind enough to offer me a free upgrade. A flight journey is invariably synonymous with a packed Cathay Pacific 400-seater or four hours of Omaret Yakobean aboard Air Arabia's Boeing 737s. The ordinary folks that we are, my family and I are loyal customers of the RCI Resorts and the Midway Motels of the world. An odd Sheraton stay makes my day. The last line rhymes, by the way. That I had another first-timer for company helped, of course. I still made a fool of myself, but it was reassuring to have someone by my side through all my buffoonery.

My blog turned two earlier this year- an occasion that I, in a spate of laziness, conveniently chose to ignore. The forty posts notwithstanding, my blog is far from the complete chronicles of my life in R-Land that Miss Muffet keeps referring to. Strangely enough, the most memorable events are the ones that don’t find a place on my blog. The two trips to Allahabad, the ushering in of the new year, the Dark Knight at Satyam on my birthday, the encore two days later, Nihilanth, Watch Out, the 28th of August, 2007- the high points of the last two years are all conspicuous by their absence. Some moments are too sacrosanct to write about, perhaps; some memories too special to be shared. My third trip to the financial capital in as many years is the newest addition to the aforesaid list.

B for Baster

2009-03-17T03:17:00.009+05:30

Even by the high standards I’ve set for myself, 3-2 will go down as the most miserable sem yet. It’s the worst of both the worlds, I tell you- the initial vigour has long evaporated; while senile nostalgia is still a year away. Bakar sessions at Alpahar are few and far between. Every half-decent girl in the insti either calls you ‘sir’ or is an M Sc student. Even foosball isn’t fun anymore. If I had to pick one word to sum up pre-final year, it would have to be ‘regretful’. Trust me, that’s all you ever do. The six-pointers regret their CG; 8 pointers regret the fact that they haven’t got an intern yet; those with an intern in Germany yearn for one in Spain; those with one in Spain long for a trip to Britain; others reconcile themselves to sixty more days in the insti, courtesy BHEL Haridwar. The 'grass on the other side' proverb never was truer. It’s all strangely reminiscent of that HDFC advert (the long-haired guy envies the guy with a funti, while the funti looks longingly at a bald guy with a necklace, who in turn jealously eyes the aforementioned long-haired guy. Remember?)

I was short-listed for an interview by Regal Beloit. The last statement has drawn two kinds of responses. Most people instantly come up with wisecracks that range from the reasonable (“Does Deloitte have a thing for ‘happy’ males?”) to the downright lame (“Deloitte will be well-lit”), mistaking it for the consultancy firm that has recruited the Three Wise Men. Inevitably, I respond, “No, it’s Beloit- with a ‘b’, as in debt; and not with a ‘b’, as in Venezuela.” My batch-mates, though, are more conversant with the happenings in and around the Old Library. A tad too conversant, in fact. Most seem perturbed by the fact that I made the cut in the first place. New theories on why I was selected while 8.5’s and 9.1’s were shown the door are propounded every other day. At any rate, the interview was taken by two males: A and B. A was the quintessential haddu bloke- heavy voice, lousy accent, a tongue-twister for a surname- the whole nine yards. He was the tech-guy. B was the HR guy, and was A’s opposite in every possible way, as you’ll see.

A: Tell us something about yourself.

Me: Rehearsed speech laced with lots of jargon- dynamic, proactive and whatnot.

A: Why haven’t you done any projects?

Me: My area of interest is electric machinery and their design. That’s primarily an industrial field- apart from the basics, there is little that can be done in labs. This is the first opportunity that came my way and I jumped at it.

A: Fine, what about the summer breaks?

Me: I spent them lazing at home. Do you have a problem with that, mister?

Industrial internships aren’t encouraged in our insti after second year. Plus, I’d had a really strenuous year and was eagerly looking forward to spending some time with my family. That I got bored to death within a fortnight is a different matter altogether.

A didn’t seem amused. B chuckled, though.

B: So, Abhishek. I see you are an avid quizzer and also the editor-in-chief of a magazine. Shouldn’t you be looking for a non-technical intern?

Me: Those are my interests, sir. But I really can’t picture myself writing or quizzing for a living.

B chuckles again. A grunts.

A: Doesn’t your college have courses with compulsory projects?

Me: We have had case studies and assignments, sir, but no compulsory projects, I’m afraid.

B: Anyway, the elections are approaching. What do you think about them? Do you see any change in the general trend this time around?

Me: (Had no idea what he had in mind. Beat about the bush for a while) There is the third front, for one thing. That apart, there are campaigns like Lead India and Jaago Re, which shows that people are looking for ways to change the present system. And it’s about time too.

B: I see you’ve also spoken to Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam (referring to some dumb interview I did for my school mag a million years ago) What did you think of him as a President?

Me: (Clueless. Fatte to the rescue again) In India, I think the President is more of a representative than a head of state. As the constitutional head of state, Presidency is more about the stature of the person and the image he portrays of the country, and I believe no one did that better than Kalam.

A cleared his throat. I half-expected another ‘where are the projects?’ It didn’t come, thankfully.

A: Do you have any questions?

Me: I do, sir. As much as I want to join Regal Beloit, there is a fair chance that I might return empty handed. What, then, do I get from the intern, apart from experience?

A: Some irrelevant bull on the history of Beloit and why it was the greatest company ever.

B: Frankly, the money apart, this is the best intern you could hope to get for the simple reason that at the end of the internship, depending on your performance, you could even be assured of a job in our HQ at Beloit, Wisconsin. As an electrical engineer, I can’t see what more you could ask for. Does that answer your question?

Me: It does sir. Thank you very much. Good afternoon.

B: Good afternoon.

A: Grunt.

Ek Sau Bees Minute

2009-03-02T16:42:00.003+05:30

Kick Off- 10min: Call up Bihari Potter and ask him where he plans to watch the game. Decide to make the Great Trip to the Gaon(TM) and pay Leftiekins, Raps and the other Lords of the Farmhouse a visit.

KO-5min: Call up Leftiekins to inform him of TGTTTG (TM), only to be informed of his date with Messrs. Moet and Chandon.

KO-3 min: “Lefty is getting drunk- Jawahar it is then,” reads the message I send Bihari Potter. The miser that I am, I choose to ignore the 'Delivery Failed' message that arrives a minute later.

2 min: The Alter Ego calls up from Tambiland to express his fury at the absence of Rooney from the starting lineup (or the bench, for that matter). “Fergie knows,” I reassure him, before going on to share my two-pence worth on the rest of the starting line-up.

5 min: Cross the roundabout beside the E&C tower (which, I’m told, is oddly named ‘Kranti Chowk’).

7 min: The Decayed Canine calls up from Pune for the starting lineup. He can’t watch the game as Tata Consulting Engineers Consulting Engineers didn’t see the need for something as superfluous as a net connection and wanted me to keep him abreast of all major developments at Wembley. An obedient nod and a dozen swear words later, I hang up and resume my long journey.

11 min: Meet BeKayEll at the entrance of Jawahar, who instantly sets off on a rant on Dilli 6, Abhishek Bachchan’s fake accent and the absurdly hairy kaala bandar. I politely inform him that I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep.

13 min: The mention of the hairy creature reminds me that I’d sent the Hairy Hick and Bihari Potter off on the Great Trip to the Gaon(TM). I call up B-Pot and deliver a rehearsed speech, placing all the blame on Leftiekins' frail shoulders.

18 min: Reach the Jawahar TV Room, only to be welcomed by the sight of Ramnaresh Sarwan and co. tearing apart a hapless English seam attack.

21 min: Reality finally dawns on yours truly. Abuse Subhash Chandra and the pitiful excuse for a sports channel that he runs, before setting off for Sushi’s room with the Hairy Hick and Bihari Potter, who had just arrived.

Half Time: ‘0-0’ reads the big blue box on ESPN Soccernet. The 50000-something members of the Manchester United Orkut community agreed, before adding that the second half would be telecast live on Zee Sports.

47 min: Another reality check. Zee Sports was facing technical issues. East Bengal vs Mohun Bagan it will be, then.

49 min: Long ball from the flanks falls perfectly to a defender, who makes a hash of his clearance and, more by luck than judgement, the cross found its target. ‘Good football all around,’ remarks the nasal commentator. Was that sarcasm, I wonder.

57 min: Can take no more. Set off for the canteen and ask for a packet of Lays. “Lays nahin hai, chai piyoge?” enquired the vendor. Just not my day, I think to myself.

62 min: Return to Sushi’s room and try to find a half-decent live-streaming site, only to view the hazy contours of a guy in a yellow jersey, with a lot of noise in the background. Cursing the Jawahar Wi-Fi, we reconcile ourselves to the live commentary on GameCast.

75 min: ‘United ki fat gayi! Vidic on for O’Shea,’ exclaims a jubilant Kangaroo Kid. ‘Why does he care so much?’ I wonder, only to be reminded by Sushi that Chel$ea’s only hope of silverware this season was the Champions League, where they’d first have to get past Delpiero and co. There are some things money can’t buy. For every thing else, there is Roman Abrahamovic.

120 min: Full time. No goals. For the third time in two years, we were involved in a penalty shootout at the Wembley.

FT+11 min: Foster is the man. 4-1 to United. The four of us huddled, just as we had after that night at Moscow.

FT+ 25 min: The Alter Ego calls up again. ‘We are the champions,’ I sing into the phone, much to the amusement of the others at the Azad Canteen.

FT+ 874 min: I remember that I hadn’t updated the Decayed Canine yet. I spend the last two bucks of my balance on a message. It reads:

“The Carling Cup is ours. Two down. Three to go. Glory glory Man. United.”

Of Free Kicks, Auschwitz and EE-305

2009-01-28T12:00:00.003+05:30

Life has its own ways of putting the mediocre in their place. The odd Devarshi Patel apart, we are all shown our respective places on the social ladder so often that we accept them without a whimper. The kiwi doesn’t fritter away its good karma praying for flight. The crow doesn’t spend all its life cursing its Creator for the voice He had bestowed it with. The Scousers don’t weep all day over the fact that they’ve won just about nothing in the last two decades. One way or another, we reconcile ourselves to the fact that we suck. To varying degrees, of course.

Then again, there are a good many who live a life denial, merely to feel better about themselves. The image of John O’ Shea hopefully eyeing every single free kick comes to mind. Defiance is one thing; delusion of glory quite another.

It’s been an awfully chilly month and the weather’s put paid to all my hopes of making a good first impression on the men in front of the blackboard. It isn’t my fault, you see- the soporific effects of winters are well-documented. Never one to throw in the towel, I have been working that extra bit harder for the spotlight, however big a nuisance Lady Slumber made of herself.

It was a deceptively banal Friday afternoon and I was one tutorial away from a long-awaited weekend. The Journeyman, whose reputation as a tyrant preceded his pot-bellied self, arrived sooner than we’d expected and turned Room 311A into what seemed like Modern India’s answer to Auschwitz. Sparing myself the drudgery of solving the worksheet didn’t help a great deal either. The situation was growing grimmer by the moment. I had to separate myself from the DANPARC-clad masses and time was fast running out.

I didn’t have to wait too long though. “Why is an asynchronous machine known so?” bellowed the Journeyman. The discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, Buddha's enlightenment, the fall of the WTC, the manufacture of the first Snickers bar - there are some moments in history that the world will never forget- moments when the destiny of the world would literally change courses. This was one of those moments. Twenty pairs of eyes stared in collective disbelief. The waves in the faraway sea ebbed for a fleeting moment. The frigid January breeze paused. A hand had been raised. A voice long-suppressed was asking to be heard. It was mine.

I strung together a reply laced with every single bit of technical jargon I was aware of. The impossible had just happened. The Journeyman had been silenced. Staggering, he exclaimed, “Dela, you’re the man.” That, at least, was how I’d pictured it in my mind. Truth, as always, wasn’t only stranger but harsher too.

“Utter rubbish”, he exclaimed with an expression that wasn’t unbeknownst to me. He seemed to want to add to that, when, thankfully, She Who Must Not Be Named interrupted. “Sir, the actual reason is that *random electrical funda goes here*.”

Cristiano Ronaldo lines up a long free kick. Two yards away, John O’Shea watches on in mute envy.

Clichés aren't old hat

2008-12-17T19:07:00.004+05:30

Twelfth grade English lectures were one of the high points of my otherwise humdrum school life. For one thing, English-Core was the easiest subject by a fair distance, at least for the scant few with the poor sense to opt for biology. For another, our classes were handled by a certain Miss Pretty. Miss Pretty, sadly, didn’t live up to her name, which, FYI, was due to her obsession with that annoying American usage whereby it is considered hip to replace ‘very’ with ‘pretty’ wherever possible and hipper(?) if you say it with a fake accent.

Argh, digressions. So where was I? Yes, Miss Pretty wasn’t pretty. Nor was she attractive by any stretch of imagination. But for the thousands of starved eyes that inhabited DAV Boys’ Gopalapuram, she was all that. And more. She was our answer to Rockford’s Nandita Das, the cute Chink from that Korean movie or the bikini clad lady from the Van Halen song. DAV Boys had more than its share of weirdos, each odder than the next, but if there was something that they shared despite all their bizarreness, it was a crush on Miss Pretty. The Bulk, of course, was an exception.

What made her classes all the more enjoyable, for me, was the rare distinction of Teacher’s Pet. She had her flaws too, like her annoying habit of referring to me as ‘Bella’. That apart, there were few who’d refute my position as her favourite student in 12A. The reasons weren’t too far to seek either. Miss Pretty and I shared a love for clichés, however tiresome everyone else found them. Long hours were spent in class with us firing clichés at each other, as I gradually took over as the apple of her eye.

My love for clichés, as the last line would have demonstrated, persists to this very day. It's all well and good to come up with new stuff, but I, for one, would rather take a riff on the familiar. Besides, expressions become clichés because they work and people like them, buy them and therefore writers use them. They don't become clichés because writers are lazy and it's easier to repeat the same thing over and over than to think up something different. On second thought, writers do use them because they are lazy, but that’s not the point. Love them or hate them, there is no denying the fact that every other day, we encounter a situation perfectly described by the very clichés we love to hate.

One of my personal favourites has always been, ‘so near, yet so far’, perhaps owing to the frequency with which I come across situations apt for its usage. Like how I made it all the way to London but could not take the 6-hour train to Manchester. I visited Emirates and Wembley, but that only made Old Trafford seem all the more elusive. Or the time I topped just about every subject only to be denied the Bulk’s magical tally of 493 by a dismal 84% in Hindi. All that notwithstanding, yesterday would go down as the cruelest instance of ‘so near, yet so far’.

Even as I type, The Dubai International Film Festival is on, with the likes of Salma Hayek, Kim Kardashian and Yvonne Strahovsky within striking distance of yours truly. As you would expect, I was there with the Timid Twins, hoping and praying for the 500-dirham entry pass to magically appear on our palms. A hundred yards ahead of us, a blonde strode elegantly on the red carpet. “Nicole Kidman”, informed the security guard, before rushing to get a closer glimpse himself, leaving us at the mercy of his Terrier. The blonde was safely inside by the time the Twins stopped cursing each other for not bringing along a pair of binoculars. “If only we could teleport,” exclaimed one. “Or get hold of Hiro Nakamura”, chipped in the other. The conversation went on for a while; my only contribution, though, was, “so near, yet so far”.

Society, you're a crazy breed

2008-12-10T18:51:00.005+05:30

Only for the third time in seven years, I’m on the island I once called home. It is still home for all technical purposes, but a cancerous proliferation of concrete has left me all but an alien in the locality I grew up in, but I’ll get to that in another post. Bahrain, for the uninitiated, is the Middle-East’s answer to Las Vegas. That, of course, isn’t saying much, but for a person who has spent the last thirty-odd months in a ghetto with nothing remotely feminine within a two-mile radius, the Island of Pearls is no less than Paradise.

The prospect of spotting an East-European belly-dancer from your balcony, sadly, doesn’t appeal as much to the average forty-plus NRI housewife, leading them to engage in less-exciting pursuits such as the weekly desi get-together. Needless to add, attendance is compulsory.

A pool-side dinner, Himesh oooing away in the background, sugary tea and spicy achaar- desi get-togethers in this part of the globe are all the same. While the mums and dads make small talk on how much weight each of them has lost and the kids make the most of the trampoline in the backyard, the solitary 20-year-old is far from welcome.

Yesterday, thankfully, I had company in the form of a hexagenarian bachelor in bell-bottoms. Earlier in the day, Chel$ki had wriggled its way into the last 16 of the Champions League, Lindsay Lohan was spotted kissing in Vermont and Fox News was rife with pictures of Christiano Ronaldo’s new girlfriend. None of that, however, seemed appropriate for a conversation with a retired neurosurgeon, particularly one sporting a T-shirt that read, ‘Om Sweet Om’.

After the mandatory ‘who/what/why/where/how are you’s were exchanged, our conversation seemed to have hit a dead-end. Bell Bottoms seemed far from defeated, though. With topics of interest running dry, he hit upon an infallible technique to ensure our conversation’s continuity. Excerpts:

Bell-bottoms: “You lived in Bangalore, didn’t you?”
Me: “Yes I did.”
BB: “Do you know Random Guy1?”
Me: “No I don’t.”
BB: “Do you know Random Guy2?”
Me: “No.”
BB: “Do you know Random Guy3?”
Me: “No.”
……….
……….
And so it went on.

Two hundred and sixty two ‘no’s’ later,

BB: “Do you know Random Guy 265?”
Me: “Oh yes, he was my classmate in Kindergarten.”
BB: “He was my neighbour. Isn’t that amazing?”
In the meantime, our tête-à-tête was cut short by The Good Host, who seemed troubled that I didn’t seem bored. “So Bell-Bottoms,” he enquired, “you seem to be having a great time with Dela.” “The usual, you know, old friends catching up”, replied the man whom I still know only as Mr. Bell-Bottoms.

The Hundred (and one) Days

2008-10-02T19:40:00.014+05:30

It has been a while. In the truest sense, this too wouldn’t count as a post- a fact that will dawn on you by the time you’re done reading it. Yes, this is another of those SriP-esque posts on not-posting. Bon nuit.

I completed 100 days on the other side of the wall yesterday, or I thought I did, until Mom shattered my bubble and dutifully reminded me that August had 31 days, which made me 20 and a 101 days. Ah, technicalities.

A lot has happened since my last post. An eventful train ride with the Super Nerd was followed by a highly entertaining weekend at Facchaville on the pretext of recruiting minions. I watched Dark Knight for the five hundred and twenty seventh time and drew a lot of flak for my comment on Facebook that it was the greatest movie ever. The Morons set off on a historic trip to the City That Never Sleeps and spent an amazing evening at Hard Rock Café. I fell in love the very next day with a cap and splurged two hundred odd bucks at Adlabs on ‘Rock On’, the cliché-fraught band movie with a few hilariously stupid Hinglish dialogues (‘Tumour mere brain ka hissa ban chuka hai.’) providing some much-needed comic relief.

R-Land welcomed her heroes home with a TS, where the legendary Gee Kay Ess awarded yours truly a naught on twenty five. A long overdue epistle was sent home and I was declared the winner of the War of Words on popular demand ahead of His Wordiness Sheldon Cooper. Somewhere in between all that, I also managed to watch Bollywood’s magnum opus- Junoon (Hero fights with a tiger, Hero gets bitten by the tiger, Hero becomes a tiger.)

Lots of post-worthy material and yet, the only changes my blog saw in the last two months was an absurd Feed Tracker that went unnoticed by even the most faithful of my readers. (Special mention must be made of the Hirsute Hick who visits my blog ten times a day, at least when he isn’t hitchhiking across South East Asia and posing for ridiculous pics like this one and this one. )

Have I given in to the duresses of change already? Teenage Dela would have ranted on at least half a dozen of the aforementioned events. Dela the Tween, though, has all but forgotten about his blog. Maturity, I think, is the term I’m looking for. ‘Bull crap! You’re just getting lazier,’ retorts Bald Guy Junior. Another plausible explanation.

Men are from Mars, Kids are from Ceres

2008-08-03T10:49:00.000+05:30

Popularity comes with a price tag, and an increasingly hefty one at that, a fact you'd be aware of if you have been following the meteoric rise in the prices of action figures since the days when we went, ‘Wow, GI Joe!’ every time the Real American Hero was on air (Coming to think of it, I still go, ‘Wow, GI Joe!’ every time he’s on TV but that’s a different story altogether) While I do enjoy giving myself a mental pat-on-the-back every time one of the twenty billion progeny of my ten billion cousins insists on singing Glory Glory Man United even during the Euro 2008 or throws up a fuss about combing his/her hair, my huge kindergarten fan base coerces me into doing many things I’d rather not- like attend their birthday parties.

One of my favourite videos of my extensively photographed childhood is that of Bird Brain’s tenth birthday. The spoilt son that I was, not getting the first slice of the cake and being allowed as much camera-time as my grandmother weren’t situations I faced every other day. Exasperated, ‘I hate all birthdays,’ I exclaimed, adding, ‘except for my own’, almost as an afterthought. Fifteen years hence, there is just one aspect of birthdays that I find just as abhorrent as I did then- gifts.

The days of waking up at six in the morning and ripping open the twenty odd boxes on the coffee table seem as distant a memory as my diapers. The other side of the transaction, sadly, isn’t one bit as much fun. I never have a problem with girls – the simple creatures that they are, Barbie and Candy will be the most happening things in their world even ten generations down the line. Buying gifts for boys is quite another thing though. What do boys play with these days? Are Hot Wheels still as popular as they were in our time? Are Batman figurines still in production?

The fact that my favourite nephew’s big night was merely an hour away didn’t help either. Nor did the fact that I had to turn up in a costume.

45 minutes. Putting off Kaley Cuoco and the rest of the story on Nerdmabelia Scattering for later in the evening, I made my way to Landmark, unsure and annoyed. I was back in the car-park five minutes later, poorer by a grand but armed with the most powerful man in the universe (and, more importantly, the cheapest superhero figure in the store- Spidey cost a whopping 1500 bucks.)

I reached ten minutes late, but I was left hoping I’d taken longer. ‘Musical Chairs’ was followed by ‘What’s the good word?” (which I won, by the way) and the latter by an absurd spoon-game with an equally absurd name. As the evening drew to a long awaited climax, Birthday Boy was curious to know what his beloved Uncle Dela had got him. “I’ve brought you the most powerful man in the universe,” I announced, in the most dramatic baritone I could manage. His eyes lit up instantly. “Superman?” he enquired. "Try again", I replied reassuringly. “Wolverine?” he tried, half hopefully. “Wrong again, this is HE-MAN”, I declared at a pitch that made the hall shudder and the entire audience gape with what I believed was a stunned silence. It wasn’t, as I would realize a couple of minutes later. “Who the heck is this guy?” enquired Birthday Boy.

Is DC Comics’ marketing division listening?

The clock ticks life away..

2008-07-20T10:51:00.000+05:30

75 minutes to go...

Wikipedia tells me that I'll now be in the exalted company of Ana Ivanovic, Nicklas Bendtner, Anderson, Aaron Carter and Bow Wow, to name a few. The list goes on to list a thousand other names ranging from the strangely familiar (Michael Cera, Cybil..) to the completely unknown (Begüm Dalgalar?). As I went through it, I found myself wondering, not for the first time, whether I even deserved to be in that list, albeit with a million other losers for company. At times I wonder, is it just me or do all twenty-year olds love watching Tom and Jerry? Does Bendtner still wear a helmet and pretend to be Darth Vader? Does Anderson still spend hours playing with his Hot Wheels collection, painstakingly collected over 17 years of haggles and bargains? Life has been a blur. Age has come about far sooner than I would have liked it to, and sadly, maturity seems to taking its own jolly time to set in, leaving me stuck between a world where I don't belong and another where I shouldn't.

My melancholic reverie, sadly, was cut dismally short by the Envious Samaritan's remark, made more than half seriously, that I'm fast turning into a far gloomier version of the Decayed Canine. Scary thought that.

P.S: Contrary to what the title might suggest, I still loathe Linkin Park.

Footnote (courtesy Lefty): In a curious coincidence, HHH turned 18 this 18th, I turn 20 this 20th and Lefty 21 on the 21st.

Kaka, unfortunately, doesn't turn 24 this Thursday.

Five and out

2008-07-08T11:49:00.001+05:30

Most forms of art have always been well beyond my modest comprehension capacity. The Guernica, to me, is no more than a bouillabaisse of weird shapes and even weirder-looking people. To the best of my sensibilities, the melting clocks in The Persistence of Memory are as profound as a Britney Spears solo. I firmly believe that, given the chance, my brother could easily better van Gogh’s wilting Sunflowers. The only strokes I found even remotely artistic are those off the willow of Sachin Tendulkar. There isn’t a masterpiece more beautiful than the one-handed backhand that won Federer the second set against the consistently erratic Safin. Maradona’s sixty yard run in that historic World Cup semifinal that led to Argentina’s second goal is more graceful than even the most stunning of ballet renditions. My indisposition towards all forms of art and dance notwithstanding, my loyalties in all sports have tilted towards the more artistic and graceful (with the notable exception of F1 where I have suffered from an inexplicable and often unreasonable predilection for McLaren right from the days when the penultimate page of The Khaleej Times was my sole link with the world of Ecclestones, Hakkinens and Schumachers).

The sad thing about sport, though, is that there is a lot more to it than mere grace. Resilience, strength and some luck is often all it takes to excel. Then again, success is one thing and greatness quite another. For all their talent, Johan Cryuff and his legendary Clockwork Oranje never won a major tournament. Despite being the more elegant and technically sound of the two, Mark Waugh could not compeer his prolific twin. More recently, Chelsea were inches away from lifting the Champions League earlier this summer. Indeed, a certain Geenius and a Kangaroo Cub would even argue, not entirely without reason, that they were the more deserving of the two sides. Yet, even if John Terry not succumbed to that historic (and hilarious) slip, a United fan would still have gone home proud of the many moments of genius displayed by his side. I could spend all day describing Scholes’ thunderbolt at Camp Nou. I could write pages and pages on Rooney’s inch-perfect thirty yard pass that nearly led to United’s second goal at Moscow. What memories would have Chelsea carried home from the tournament? Those of the two million own goals that the opposition defenders chose to score for them, realizing that such feats were well beyond the modest capabilities of Drogba and Sheva? Or those of the three million deflections that led to the few goals that Chelsea players scored for themselves?

Though it did in Moscow, fortune doesn’t always favour the worthy. Case in point: the Wimbledon finals. Though out-of-sorts initially, Federer’s game was as imperial as ever by the third set. He seemed to have clawed his way back into the game from two sets down, and with the third set in a row entering tie-breakers, I had a hunch that Federer was well on course to breaking Borg’s record. History, sadly, chose to repeat itself, with Rafa replacing McEnroe in the encore. To his credit, Rafa has come a long way from the brash teenager whose resilience was his sole weapon who made it to the finals two years ago. And yet, even the most loyal of the Spaniard’s supporters wouldn’t declare him a better player than the Swiss Master.

Claude Makelele can get away with a thousand more fouls and he can still not hope to equal Zidane even in his wildest dreams. MS Dhoni can endorse a zillion more products and he still won’t get any closer to the iconic status enjoyed by Sachin. Rafa’s energy and baseliners may win him ten more Wimbledon titles in the years to come, and yet, he’ll still be second best to Federer.

A year ago, 2008 seemed to be year that would be remembered in the history books as the one when Federer scaled Mount Sampras and Mount Borg. Sadly, nothing has gone his way and his grand slam tally has all but stagnated at 12. Mount Sampras seems to be slipping away with each passing tournament and Mount Borg now an impossibility. And yet, despite the prospects of retirement looming large at the mature age of 26, Federer can still walk into the sunset with his chest held high. "I'm happy the way I fought", said the great man after the epic battle, "that's all I could really do."

Burgundy Alert

2008-06-19T12:10:00.000+05:30

For a good part of my childhood, I believed that the world was entirely black and white until a few decades ago, with seas devoid of their azure and meadows of their verdure. Colour, like TV, chocolates, Hot Wheels and most other wonderful things in the world must be one of mankind’s brainchildren (sic), I thought, deceived by the movies of that era. Realization dawned upon me soon enough, though, to this day, I often wonder if my apocryphal world would have a better place to live in. It would have been far simpler, if nothing else.

“It’s on the third row in the basement, a turquoise WagonR,” said my uncle, relenting to my innumerable requests for a drive. Now that I had his permission, I had a completely different obstacle to contend with. Not for the first time, the mention of a colour left me in a daze. Five minutes later, having tried the keys on every WagonR in sight, I learnt that turquoise is some weird shade of bluish-green.

I read a book by Sigmund Freud five years ago and decided to major in psychology, if only to prove him wrong. True to the middle-class values I was raised in, though, I took the road most travelled and ended up in R-land. I am as close to proving Freud wrong as Karan Johar is to making an intelligent movie, and the fact that psychology, philosophy and most other good electives have been done away with hardly helps my cause (Natural Disasters and Seismological Balances, anyone?) One of the few things I do know about human psychology is that we are all born with a voice within us that keeps telling us that there are millions out there superior in brain and brawn. Our entire life is spent fighting that voice. For some, this is all about leaving those around flipping through the dictionary at the slightest of opportunities (The Decayed Canine and his blog come to mind).

Having a good vocabulary is one thing. Dishing out ridiculously fancy terms like turquoise and burgundy like every other guy on the street knew them is quite another. What do you lose by calling burgundy dark-red? Or turquoise bluish-green? So the next time we converse, please bear in mind the fact that my vocabulary isn’t the best in the world, especially when it comes to colours (chromatically challenged, if you like). To the best of my knowledge, peach is a fruit. So is apricot. And I have no idea what mauve is.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

2008-05-26T04:31:00.000+05:30

I was reading Bachi Karkaria’s article on ‘Les Folies de Marrakech’- the Islam-compatible cabaret minus the usual g-strings, low-waists et al. Think about it, a cabaret without flesh is like chocolate without sin. If you feel virtuous about it, you are taking away its essential allure. This applies even to inseperable pairs without an element of forbidden salaciousness. Imagine Sholay without Gabbar or Mourinho without the loose-talk. They just feel strangely incomplete.

I have enjoyed pulling people’s legs ever since the day I was born. Perhaps a harbinger of the onset of maturity, I have mellowed down considerably over the last two years. Nevertheless, over my long career, my casualties have all been of two knds: those who hide their displeasure at being teased and those who don’t. Three years ago, though, I met a person who fell into neither of the aforementioned categories. The guy had an ego the size of my toe-nail. I could have teased him for the rest of his life and he still wouldn’t have cared. Worse, the entire leg-pulling ritual seemed to provide him as much pleasure as it provided me. Ridiculing him was like, in many ways, the Islam-compatible cabaret – it just wasn’t fun anymore.

The eighteen years of my existence prior to my arrival in R-Land took me to 3 different cities and 5 different schools. More out of nostalgia than anything else, I make it a point to visit them whenever I get the time. Friends had Central Perk. HIMYM has McLaren’s. Seinfeld had Monk’s Café. R-Land has Alpahar and Nesci. And PSBB had AB. I don’t even remember what the A stood for any more, but one thing I do remember is that I loved the Bhel Puri there. It neither tasted nor looked like the eponymous Chaat dish we have all grown to love but in its own way, it was delicious. As the final year of my schooling dawned, I returned to PSBB (and to AB) one last time. The price of the Bhel Puri had increased by a buck since my last visit. The quantity seemed to have shrunk too. AB had also adopted a flashier new board in my year-long absence. One thing that hadn’t changed, thankfully, was the taste of the Bhel Puri, which was just as heavenly as it was a year ago. Mmmm…

While I made love to my Bhel Puri an over-sized fellow customer had his eyes fixed upon me. Worse, he was smiling at me. There was nothing to be done but return the smile. And yet, I didn’t. Two minutes later, a historic conversation began.

Unknown Fat Guy: "Hi. Do you study in PSBB?"

Me: "No, but I used to until a year ago."

UFG: "Oh, when did you pass out? (which, by the way, is a phrase that annoys me. ‘To pass out’, as far as I’m concerned, is to faint.)

Me: "Yesterday, when van Nistelrooy missed the penalty against Arsenal."

UFG: "What?"

Me: "Never mind. Which class are you in?"

UFG: "I’ll be going to the 12^th this year."

Me: "Oh nice. I was your batch-mate until a year ago."

UFG: "Wow, then do you know *some random name*?"

Me: "No."

UFG: "You must be knowing *some other random name*?"

Me: "No, I don’t."

50 random names later, he still wouldn’t give up. Eventually, I decided the only way I could end this conversation was by humouring the bonehead. I went on to claim to know a dozen people I hadn’t even heard of. On that happy note, I thought the conversation would be wrapped up. I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

UFG: "You know so many people I know. I know so many people you know. Yet I don’t know you and you don’t know me. Isn’t that amazing?"

Me: "You know what else is amazing? That you’re still alive."

UFG: "Haha. You’re funny."

Me: "Haha. You’re not."

UFG: "Hahaha. Anyway, I’m waiting for a friend of mine. Wonder why he isn’t here yet."

Me: "I’m not surprised."

UFG: "Why?"

Me: "It’s just that you’re really Boring. With a capital B."

UFG: "Hahaha."

Me: "How is that funny?"

UFG: "My friends call me the Big B. You said I was Boring with a Big B. Pun, see?"

Me: (stunned silence)

I had given up by now. The only way this conversation could be concluded was by landing a tight slap right across his face, I decided. While I prepared for the inevitable, he went on, blissfully unaware of what lay in store for him…

UFG: "So where do you study now?"

Me: "DAV Boys’, Lloyds Road."

UFG: "Why did you join a boys’ school?"

Me: "I realized I was gay a couple of years ago."

UFG: "Err… umm… it’s getting late. I think I should leave. Bye."

Me: (to myself) "Wow, it's the third time that has worked."

…. and Dela lived happily ever after.

Fate, luck and all that jazz

2008-05-25T05:35:00.000+05:30

You are what you read, someone once told me. Should this be true of the newspapers in India, our fellow countrymen fall into two main categories: the Leftists and the voyeurs (the third major daily has been omitted owing to the fact that it is read by no one apart from PeeTeeVee and Lefty.) This being the case, the ones like yours truly who are a bit of both (or neither) are left with no choice but to buy both newspapers (or neither). Throughout my first year, the paper-wala, at my behest, dutifully dropped both The Hindu and The Times of India at my doorstep well before I woke up. Once I did, I’d ‘see’ the Times and then go on to read the Hindu. The shortcomings were many. WHile one had a bikini-clad Eva Langoria sitting right in the middle of an article on the Chennai Super Kings' recent drubbing, the other is as interesting as Morrison and Boyd. Then again, it is, as PeeTeeVee puts it, a question of alternatives.

My roomie, on the other hand swore by the Times. Not that he ever read it though, apart from the early morning five minute ‘flip-through’ ritual every Sunday. After the routine comments on Sachin’s form, Icevarya’s weight and Klodia Seefar’s looks, he would proceed to the sports column. Not that he followed any sport. What drew his attention was the astrology column on the left corner of the page by a certain Bejan Daruwala, which he recommended to every third person he met. Worse, he’d lock himself indoors if Mr. Daruwala warned him of a physical injury. ‘He even predicted my grades accurately’, he claimed, while conveniently ignoring Daruwala's prophecies on his love life, knowing that they’d never come true. Not in R-land anyway.

Han Solo is byfar my all-time favourite fictional character, followed by Aragorn and Tyler Durden. Perhaps as a consequence of this, I find the entire concept of 'destiny' phoney. Soothsaying even more so. The very existence of a predetermined course of events, never mind its correlation with stars, palms and whatnot, seems outlandish. Should ‘destiny’ exist, why would I feel a need to do anything at all? Would I rather not sit back with a bag of pop-corn and watch history take its course?

As much as I love dismissing fate as zilch, there are times when even I cannot help but feel an external hand manipulating our actions and their outcomes. On the 21^st of May, Ronaldo missed a penalty for Manchester United in the Champions League final at Moscow. John Terry and Chelsea were one kick away from lifting their maiden European trophy. Just when all seemed lost, Terry slipped as he took his shot, and sent the ball dismally wide. Two shots later, Edwin van der Sar saved Nicolas Anelka’s shot and sealed United’s third European Cup and the first since the turn of the millennium.

Sir Alex Ferguson called it ‘fate’. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. But one fact that even I can’t belie is that a force well beyond my comprehension was at work that night at Moscow. At any rate, the trophy is ours. Glory, glory….

The Other Side

2008-05-12T14:41:00.000+05:30

“You know the day destroys the night
Night divides the day
Tried to run
Tried to hide
Break on through to the other side.”

In the words of a great soul, “The oddest thing about life is that when you finally get something you hoped and prayed for, you realize that it wasn’t worth the effort in the first place.” These 27 words practically sum up everything that I’ve been through over the last fortnight. Oh, and just for the record, the aforementioned ‘great soul’ is none other than *wait for it* yours truly.

Unending syllabi, lousy vivas and lousier examinations notwithstanding, there is no fortnight more eventful than the one preceding the end-sems. It always begins with detailed study-schedules to make up for the mistakes and ‘C+’s of the past and spend days on end with those lovely red-bound manuscripts that lay forgotten under the bed ever since the start of the sem. Plans make way for hopes and dreams of an unusually simple paper or of getting a physics-defying view of the answer script of the 9 pointer two seats beside you. As D-day approaches, the too fade away, to be replaced by prayers and eventually by just an urge to get the whole thing over and done with.

My fifteen days of ‘preparation’ have all gone the same way. I woke up cursing my annoyingly loud alarm and reached the mess in a record-breaking three minutes and forty seconds, well in time for the first meal of the day- lunch. This was followed by a five minute long walk to the library, a twenty minute long search for some book that sounded at least remotely familiar, and a forty minute search for a seat with a perfect view of the hot fourth year girl two floors below. Once seated, I laboriously placed the two-pound book in front of me and studied. And studied. And studied. And studied. And studied. And studied. Or so it would have seemed to a naïve onlooker. I’ve scaled the Everest, scored goals at the Old Trafford, dated Cobie Smulders and won a Nobel Prize- all while staring blankly at those two thousand yellow-tinted sheets of paper.

Eventually, the shortcomings of my preparation came to light, shattering all my hopes of improving on the slew of C+s and Bs that stood beside my name last semester. All that remained was an eagerness to end up on the other side of the end sems- three months in a world without alarm clocks and lecture notes. Three months of unlimited sleep, food, movies and TV. Three months with Robin Scherbatsky, Frederic Barbarossa and Shannon Rutherford.

Nothing, though, is as beautiful as it is in your dreams. Now that I am on the other side, life seems just as boring. Only more so. HIMYM has nothing going for it apart from the fact that Cobie Smulders is the most beautiful woman alive. Lost is as interesting as a game of chess and the only movies on our LAN that I haven’t seen half a dozen times are the uber-lame romantic comedies that I wouldn’t watch unless my life depended on it.

And talking of being on the ‘other side’, now that I have completed my second year here (or so I hope), I am now on the wrong side of ‘the wall between the young and the young-at-heart, as Lefty fondly refers to it. Five hundred more morons will call me ‘sir’ and idolize me when I return to R-Land after the summer break. Oh crap, I’m dreaming again.

How the Maddu guy ordered tea

2008-04-16T03:20:00.000+05:30

Relativity has always fascinated me. A minute on a hot stove, as Einstein so wonderfully put it, always seems like an hour, while one next to a hot girl seems like a second. In a classic case of the former, the last two weeks have been excruciatingly long. Confined to G86 with my laptop as my sole link with the rest of the world, it was only now that I realized why solitary imprisonment is meted out only to the most notorious of criminals.

The last fortnight saw the end of my longstanding loyalty to Opera. More out of the need for a change than that for a better browser, I have switched to Safari. A fancy new browser notwithstanding, the internet has all but lost its charm. Stage6 is now defunct, and Youtube takes millennia to load. It’s been a while since I deleted my Facebook account, and the 4000 odd spammed mails in my Gmail account have made me refrain from checking my mail altogether. My GTalk account overflows with the ids of relatives I barely know and friends long since forgotten. The once addictive Orkut has become a pain, thanks to the one million scraps I receive daily on how I could unlock any album in a jiffy and the two million more saying that some fictitious girl had mentioned me in her ‘about me’ column. Me, of all the people in the world. Snowfall in the Sahara might have sounded more credible.

With little coming from my fellow bloggers in terms of entertainment, there was nothing to be done apart from some deep soul-searching. Even as the twilight of my teenage approaches, there is so much about myself that I can barely understand. I turned, yet again, to the internet for answers. What I found, though, only made me feel worse.

According to www.mypersonality.info, I am ‘creative, smart, idealist, loner, attracted to sad things, disorganized, avoidant and can be overwhelmed by unpleasant feelings.’

There was something about the result (look to your top-right-corner for details) that it occupied all my thoughts for the next couple of days. It wasn’t the not-so-flattering title of a ‘dreamer’ that bothered me. It wasn’t the fact that I had fallen into what seemed to be the worst of the 16 types on the database. It wasn’t the twenty pathetic career matches (massage therapist, librarian, church worker, to name a few) that I received. It wasn’t even the fact that the Bulk, B-Pot and the Super Nerd had all walked away with fancy descriptions and career matches. What irked me the most was the knowledge that every single word on that page was true. 20 years of my existence had come down to just 75 seemingly absurd questions.

The list of personalities I resembled, though, did well to cheer me up- JRR Tolkien, Shakespeare, Peter Jackson, Fox Mulder and most importantly, Calvin! Hmmm, the test wasn’t so bad after all.

Elsewhere, a fairytale weekend saw United hold off the resilient Gunners (albeit with some help from Lady Luck and Emmanuel Adebayor) and Chel$ki slip against the Latics. The Premiership seems destined for Old Trafford. Again. Next stop- Camp Nou.

Glory Glory Man. United!

P.S: Pay no heed to the title. It alludes to a very lame PJ I heard way back in high school.

Comfortably Numb

2008-04-08T22:20:00.001+05:30

The clocks in my room unanimously read 1 AM, save the one on my ‘study’-table that had acquired a stubborn liking for the 5 o’ clock mark ever since it’s batteries went dry a couple of months ago. Gripping my crutches, I set off on the excruciating journey to the canteen. On another day, I would have made it in under 15 seconds. Today, it took all of two minutes, thanks to the fact that I couldn’t take more than 5 steps at a stretch without stumbling. Nothing had hurt even half as much as this- not the huge bruise on my knee that has left me with a permanent scar, not the fractured bones in my forearm, not even the pin that I stapled into my finger as part of a game of ‘Dare or Confession’. With a torn ligament (and a two-foot long coating of Plaster of Paris) on my right ankle and a humongous blister on my left, if you were one of my hind-limbs, life just couldn’t get any worse.

I ordered myself a coffee and took the seat beside the lawns. The coffee was served and was halfway down my throat in the space of a few seconds. The warmth of the beverage spread to my entire body- for a few beautiful minutes, even my feet didn’t hurt much. A wonderful numbness engulfed me. This is probably what they call nirvana, I thought to myself. Though the pain was far from gone, intoxicated by the caffeine, my brain chose to ignore them, leaving me in a state of benumbed bliss.

Twelve hours later I was in an examination hall filled with an eerie silence uncharacteristic of the crowd of eighty hooligans that occupied it. The sheet I held in my hand made as much sense as a medieval Incan manuscript. As I looked at the questions on Laplace, Fourier, Poisson and a dozen other transforms with fancy names, I couldn’t agree more with Sushi and his views on the same. Exasperated, more out of habit than nervousness, I began chewing whatever little keratin was left on my finger-tips. Bored of that as well, I began counting the number of birds I could spot in the trees below, hoping to improve on my ten-minute-old tally of fourteen.

Two hours later, I turned up at another venue for another paper, though, sadly, the events that followed were the same as the ones before. The three tests today had a total of twenty two questions in all, and I managed to answer just one of them correctly. Yes, you read right. One. One in twenty two. Wes Brown probably has a better goals-to-games ratio than that. On the rickshaw ride back home, I couldn’t help but reflect on all that R-Land had done to me during my two year stay here. Two years ago, I would have died of shame had I performed half as badly as this in any examination. All of a sudden, I am this low-scoring backbencher who revels in being one. It’s hard to believe that until recently I was on par with the Ayush Goyals and Ashish Agarwals of the world, maybe even a shade ahead, if JEE rank is anything to go by. What is it that has gone wrong in the two years hence? Is it just another classic case of my indulging myself a tad too much, thanks to my new-found freedom? My fast-increasing age notwithstanding, am I still incapable of drawing a line between academics and indulgences? I entered my room determined to resurrect the Dela of old- the focused teenager who had inexplicably vanished in the twists and turns of time and fate. Ten minutes later though, another game of Warcraft commenced on our LAN, and I was the first to join in. For better or for worse, I have become impervious to the dispiriting effects of lousy grades and single-digit test scores. A CGPA like mine would have made an average person writhe, but I’m above all that. However dismal the score, I can face it bravely. Even without coffee.

‘I have become….. comfortably numb.’

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABBBBBBBBBBB

2008-04-01T02:02:00.000+05:30

Impossible, Adolf Dassler (and the innumerable celebrities endorsing his products) would have me believe, is nothing. Day in and day out, hitherto unconquered peaks are scaled, and new ones are discovered which, in time, will meet the same fate. At another level, everyone around us seems to be on a perennial mission to shatter every existing notion or opinion related to them, however remotely so. In the twelve hours that preceded (and inspired) this post, The Bulk had fewer naans than me, the Bihari Potter lost his temper, I stumbled upon a Nirvana song that actually made sense (it was 'Sliver', for those of you who care), and, in the biggest shock of them all, the iPot said something intelligent (just for the record, he said that I was a genius). Miracles, it seems, shall never cease. The ‘impossible’ seems to have a habit of failing to live up to its name.

‘Once bitten, twice sorry’ is one of the more popular of the dime-a-dozen fancy kibitzes you dish out to any freshie willing to endure your free advice out of fear or, on the odd occasion, genuine interest. Practising it, tough, is a different ball game altogether- one I'm particularly lousy at. Ten years ago, I watched Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and swore never to watch another Bollywood movie ever in my life again. Trust me, those were the twenty happiest days of my life. The oath was broken, and a couple of hours later, my hope that Bollywood might, at least by accident, come up with something decent met the same fate. Mast, Hello Brother, Karan Arjun, Kaho Na Pyaar Hai, K3G, Om Shanti Om and a dozen other movies have all been followed by fugacious vows to the same effect. In spite of the aforementioned bilge, somehow, time and again I muster the courage to attempt to endure more of the zilch that comes out of our tinsel-town. Yesterday, another entry was made to the long list above- Race.

I had to watch Pulp Fiction thrice to grasp what Quentin Tarantino was trying to tell me. It was the same with ‘The Butterfly Effect.’ But after understanding the underlying message, you are left with a feeling that it was worth all the effort. Race, presumably, is Bollywood’s answer to Pulp Fiction. Minus the satisfaction of course. Fpr one thing, the film has more twists than dialogues. Bipasha Basu, we’re initially told, is Akshay(e?) Khanna’s love interest. Five minutes later, she is shown coochie-cooing with Saif. Twenty minutes later, she sings a duet with Akshay. Couple this with the fact that there are six lead characters in the movie and you’ll understand why, at the end of the movie, I could barely spell my own name right.

Why did I start off with all that gibberish on the ‘impossible’, you ask? Race, too, achieved something incredible. It made me (and there’s no way I can understate the emphasis on the ‘me’) hate a movie that had both Katrina Kaif and Sameera Reddy in it. Before dismissing this post as another of my nonsensical, inebriated dawdles, look closer, dear reader. By narrating two seemingly irrelevant anecdotes and linking (or at least trying to) them with an absurd, virtually non-existent connection, (the genius that I am) I have made you realize exactly how you would feel after watching Race. Did someone say a picture was worth a thousand words?

P.S: Don’t pay much attention to the title. I’ve been working on TeChase a tad too long.
P.P.S: For the lesser-informed of my readers, TeChase was an online quiz that had questions ranging from the lame (Decipher, ‘River IIIIIOOOIIOOOOIOOOO’.) to the ultra-lame (Connect almonds and the phrase, ‘I love EVERY SONG you SING’).
P.P.P.S: Just for the record, I finished first.
P.P.P.P.S: Modesty is my middle name.

Wherever I may roam

2008-02-26T14:07:00.003+05:30

“How can you not like idlies da?’, catechized the Super Nerd, his mouth still filled with the rock-hard rice cakes that the Azad mess specialized in. “It’s something like ending each sentence with a ‘da’- it’s the very basic definition of a South Indian. It's what sets us apart.” I still couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. At any rate, United had just trounced the Toons in their own backyard, and I wasn’t going to ruin my mood over a couple of idlies. “Oh, I forgot,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “you aren't a true Southie anyway.” He looked at me with a part-apologetic, part-‘you deserved it’, expression; perhaps expecting to find me miffed. Maybe I should have been. For some reason, I wasn't.

There was a time when overhearing Matkas gossiping in Tamil was all it took to make my heart skip a few dozen beats. The mention of Bangalore was followed by an over-enthusiastic, ‘where in Bangalore?’ The poster of Trisha in the Ganga canteen was all it took to set off a train of thought that inevitably revolved around some place downsouth. Lately, though, like almost everything else I ever believed in, the idea of 'home' seems to have fallen apart.

As I near the halfway mark of my stay in R-Land, I can't help but wonder how much of all this I would actually grow to miss. I will miss the people, certainly, but what else? The library that I visit for the sole purpose of checking my mail? Or the Electrical Department, that has been ever so kind in awarding me more C-pluses than I could ever keep count of? Home, I've come to believe, is no more than an illusion- a mirage, if you like, of a place that promised a better life. For some, the mirage stems from their own memories of their halcyon days of youth. For others, it stems from the self-erected barriers of 'us-and-them'.

Even as I type this out, elsewhere in the country, Biharis are being stoned for committing the 'crime' of settling in another part of their own country. To make matters worse, similar sentiments have been voiced in the two other major cities of the south, though, thankfully, they have, at least so far, remained just voices of dissent. Being a part-maddu, part-kaddu, part-nothing who has spent a good part of his life abroad, the only language in which I can claim a reasonable degree of fluency is the lingua pura. My Tamil starts and ends with the knowledge of the Chennai argot and a dozen Superstar punch-dialogues that four years in Chennai are bound to endow one with. Bargaining with the auto-rickshaw wallah for a ride to 4th block is all I can manage in Kannada. Come to think of it, should the 'maratha manoos' syndrome spread to the rest of the country, I would probably get lynched in just about every single part of the country.

When will we realize that a language is only a means of communication and nothing more? That, at the end of the day you are who you choose to be, and the accident of birth in a particular place has little to do with that? It is sad that, in 1956, the government of our country chose to divide our country on a linguistic basis. What is even sadder is that, 50 years hence, we still haven’t got over those divisions.

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Il Joga Bonito

2008-02-17T08:07:00.000+05:30

There are two kinds of world: the one we dream about and the real one. In the former, I am a shade over 6-foot-4, have the brains of Einstein and the looks of George Clooney. I managed only a 9.8 in the previous semester, and hope to improve. I have the voice of Jim Morrison and the oratory of Mark Anthony (the historic character, mind you). My blog has a readership rivalled only by LOTR, with the Potter series at a far-behind five-hundred-and-second.

Regarding the latter, though, the lesser said the better. But there are times in our life when the two converge, everything seems to be going right and you have to pinch yourself to quell your fears that this was another of those sundry corny stories that ended with the cliched, 'and my mom woke me up and I realized that I had been dreaming all along.' It is days like these that remain etched in our memories- the mid sems, the grades and the innumerable other woes of daily life, somehow, fade into oblivion. It is days like these that we'll tell our grandchildren about some desolate afternoon in a summer decades from now.

Today was one such day. For one thing, we were served Gobi Manchurian in the mess. For another, Manchester United knocked Arsenal out of the FA Cup, and how! It was the kind of thing fairytales are made of. Twenty minutes into the game and I realized why Old Trafford was called the Theatre of Dreams. The Red Devils were at their best, though their cause was helped to a large extent by a series of bloopers from an out-of-sorts Gunners side.

'We won!' I exclaimed, much to the perplexity of Miss Muffet. 'Some team, representing a city you haven't even been to, won', she opined. 'What do you mean 'we'?' In more ways than one, football craze is like religion. In both, the sceptic and the believer are in a perennial state of mutual sympathy. The former pities the latter for his apparent immaturity, while the latter does so for all that the sceptic loses out on due to his apathy.

Watching Nani and Anderson make a mockery of the hapless Arsenal defence must have been heart- breaking for any gunner, especially for one as loyal as the Bulk. I couldn't help but notice, though, that in spite of his disappointment, he couldn't help but applaud Nani's artistry. United isn't just about eleven players representing Manchester, just as Arsenal isn't about London, or Liverpool about the Merseyside. Football isn't just about twenty-two players chasing a ball. It's about victory and defeat, ecstasy and heartbreaks, passion and hope, heroes and villains, glory and disgrace. Football is about life, and it takes a while for one to realize how similar the two are. Football shows you how there are days when nothing goes your way no matter how hard you try, and how there are others when you are off colour and yet, manage to walk away with the honours. How it is one thing to talk about fairplay and honesty but quite another to display it on a field with a million eyes on you. How it is easy to stand by a team in victory, but takes tonnes of faith and resolve to do so in defeat. How no matter which side you are on, the game always comes first.

As I watch my fellow United supporters go wild in celebration, I realize that no matter how hard I tried, there was no plausible explanation for our fervour (the passion?). We know our whistles and applause in the Cautley TV Room will never get anywhere near the ears of Sir Alex Ferguson, and yet, we cheer United on just about as fervently as anyone seated in Old Trafford itself. This is, as PeeTeeVee, aptly put it, a love beyond logic. 'Some day', Miss Muffet goes on, 'you'll grow up and look back and laugh at the lameness of it all.' Someday, maybe. But I sincerely hope and pray that such a day never comes.

Growing down?

2008-02-08T03:13:00.000+05:30

If there is one thing that maddus (citation: short for madrasis, a hyper-intelligent race hailing from the southern half of India.) love more than food and the Superstar, it is rain. We look forward to the monsoons the way a kid anticipates Christmas, only more eagerly. In cold and frigid R-land though, any form of precipitation is far from welcome, though that only seems to encourage Mother Nature to bless us with all the rain in the world. The icy droplets pierce one's skin like needles, and make the already near-impossible ordeal of attending the 9 o' clock lecture all the more cumbersome.

For me, though, there is a silver lining in the clouds after all. The rains, and the puddles that they bring along, mean that I can exhibit my dexterity in the art of drawing shapes on the pavement with my wet shoe-heels. The other day I even managed to write 'Dela' in the aforementioned manner. As I looked at my work of genius, oddly, it was not pride that I felt. The fact that it had come out brilliantly notwithstanding, for the first time, I felt embarrassed and bewildered by my own puerility.

As I look around, I realize that everyone around me has a sense of direction. Some are trying to put on some flab, while others are trying to lose theirs. Some are trying hard to hold on to the coveted DR-1 (short for department rank), while others are trying to make up for the uncharacteristic 7 that they scored in the autumn semester. Some are growing locks, albeit with plans to go bald the following semester. Others are busy apping away to glory to all and sundry for an internship in the suburbs of Siberia. Some moving closer to their dreams, others entrenching themselves in the long-forgotten art of studying. Summing up, everyone is moving forward. I, on the other hand, seem to be living life in reverse..

When I was eight years old, I was gripped by the age-old existential question- Who am I? People would point to their bodies, their hearts, their heads and I would drive them up the wall by saying, but that’s your body, who are you?
Now, at the age of nineteen, I crave Snickers bars.

As a sixteen year-old, I religiously attended classes. As an undergrad student, I run out of class midway through a lecture, having already procured the all-important 'P' next to my name. Moving up in life? Two years ago, I was the ideal high school student- teacher's pet (well, in all subjects except for biology, at least) and armed with a Kevin Arnold-esque boyish charm. Today, half my professors don't even know my name, and even those who do, know me for all the wrong reasons.

Why am I becoming shallower with every passing minute? Is the Roorkee water to blame?

At times I wonder, are you allotted just a certain amount of maturity? What if I used it all up as an annoying over-smart kid? Do I resign myself to a lifetime of finding joy in X-Men, puddles and Snickers bars?

Springeez

2008-01-17T17:36:00.000+05:30

On the left foot, first there is God, then there is Roberto Carlos, and then there is Dela. The Ravindra lawns shall forever be haunted by the magic that was weaved by my left foot on that sodden turf. It has sent shivers down the spines of goalkeepers and terrorized the best of defences. Of late though, my left foot is finding mention in a different context altogether. Several unworthy souls have been alluding to the fact that I have two of them. Metaphorically of course.

Why I never dance is a question I have been asked time and again, to which I have this standard reply- 'Why do you never punch yourself in the face?' This is usually followed by a perplexed gaze (like the one I sport during Solid Mech lectures), though ruminating on the statement further makes the listener realize the depth and veracity in it (Pulp Fiction?). It's not a question of my inability to dance or my lack of grace. It's more a question of not making a fool of myself. It's not that I don't appreciate music. I just don't believe that swinging your limbs around wildly like a dunce is the only way of doing so.

'Morons of a feather flock together', is a cooked up, but very true saying. Coincidentally or otherwise, there isn't a single soul in Morons Inc. that can dance. That, of course, suits me perfectly. The other day, hyde Park was converted into a makeshift discotheque, with a dimwit with a lousy accent for a DJ ('The next saang is the dedicate aaf the aadio secsun.') and a hundred more dimwits for 'dancers'. What were we doing at a discotheque, you ask? We had been informed by our sources that popcorn was being distributed at Hyde Park, and thanks to our legendary appetites, we set out on our quest for popcorn right after dinner. Well, there was no popcorn, but we weren't complaining. The entertainment outdid our expectations. It was like watching a 100 Bhojpuri heroes performing 'Thani sa Jeans' simultaneously. The DJ's accent only added to all the fun. We left an hour later- tired, but thoroughly entertained, having imitated the steps of almost every other dolt on the dance floor.

I recently made a list of things that I couldn't do but would love to. As you would expect, singing was right on top of the list, followed by drawing, bowling (as in the gentleman's game), why, even skiing! Curiously enougyh, dancing did not find a place. I'm a Maddu, for God's sake. Dancing isn't in my blood. I hail from a land where all the hero ever does is walk around flashing his bright red pants and electric blue tees. It's always the heroines who do the dancing around. Of course, every now and then, there are noteworthy (and hilarious) exceptions like 'Tic Tic Tic', but by and large, dancing is a strict no-no downsouth. Having said that, it's not like I'm a complete goner when it comes to dancing. the other day, while dusting my room (hear hear!) I found a souvenir from the days of yore- a certificate to the effect that Abhishek Sunder(Hmph) was the best dancer in 'Salsa/Western' category. It also said that I was a student of class Kindergarten B, but that's beside the point.

Two left feet, anyone?

There and Back Again: A Spider's Tale

2008-01-07T00:31:00.000+05:30

DISCLAIMER: This piece was written by the author when his mind was under the influence of the inimical combination of jetlag and boredom. If you find it weird and meaningless, do not
be surprised. That's how it was intended to be.

'The spiders all in tune,
The evening of the moon,
Dreams are made winding through my head.'

Had it not been for the fact that they made no sense to me, I would have sued System of a Down for these lines ages ago. Why can't man leave us alone? There is no superhero named Locust Man. There is no Grasshopper Solitaire. Lamborghini doesn't call the convertible variant of Gallardo a wasp. Why does it always have to be us spiders? Not only are we used as and when needed, our cities are mercilessly destroyed every now and then, and the remains are treated like dirt. It is no surprise, hence, that we loathe men, particularly the ones finicky about cleanliness.

I am more broad-minded though, at least by arachnid standards. Men are not always nefarious beings. They have their soft spots, too. Mankind is extremely considerate at times, especially when it comes to issues such as plagiarism. I wrote a novel recently titled 'Uragon', which was an outright rip-off of 'Lord of the Rings' (a novel by a human named Tolkien). Even the name of my protagonist sounded similar to the one in the original, Aragorn. Though, being an Arachnid, I did not have anything to fear, I was still afraid that, someday, my stealth would be discovered. My fears were quelled a few years ago thpugh, when I learnt that another rip-off, this time by a fellow human, had been released, and this time around, the protagonist was named Eragon- another spin-off of Aragorn. Why, I even heard that, despite the obvious plagiarism, it turned out to be a huge success. What a bunch of dolts!

I happen to have an inexplicable liking for the human in whose room I am put up. Though it may sound outlandish, we have a lot in common. Neither of us can sing too well. I have two, sorry, eight left feet, and he can't dance to save his life either. His aversion to cleanliness is what I like about him the most, though. His room has now become one of the most sought after locations in the country, though there are myths regarding the existence of a canine in Jawahar whose room is even filthier.

Dela has been acting weird today though. It is probably the chillness. Holy crap! Are my eyes playing tricks on me? Some orange-clad weirdo has just handed Dela a broom. I must warn the others before it's too

P.S: Got hit. Won't live much longer. Can't complete the story. G89 no longer safe. Don't mourn my death, brothers. Avenge it. Dela has turned over to the dark side. He's started cleaning his room. Et tu brute!

Pee(,)TeeVee

2007-12-20T21:41:00.000+05:30

The darkest hour is just before dawn, it is said. After the draconian head of academics was dealt with (at least temporarily) the winter holidays are here and things have finally brightened up, and how! Nothing, it seems, can go wrong. A phone call to any of my batch-mates enquiring my GPA for the semester that passed is all it will take to dampen my spirits, but why bother? College begins in about two weeks’ time, and at least until then, I want to remain in Lady Luck’s good books (or at least believe that I still am).

I went to Seef to watch ‘I am Legend’ the other day. For those of you who have never set foot on the ‘Island of Pearls’, Seef is the Middle East's answer to PVR, iMax and even Broadway. I was on my way to get my bag of pop-corn, when I couldn't help but notice one particular girl in the queue. She had a face you couldn't take your eyes off, (or, to quote The Reptile, a 10 pointer) like those on the cover of a Mills & Boon novel. Okay, bad example, but anyway, it makes my point. Just when I decided that she was out of my league and resolved to focus on my pop-corn instead, she walked right up to me. 'Hi Abhishek! How have you been?' she asked, leaving me cursing my memory, or rather the lack of it. How could I have forgotten someone so stunning? 'Now that Lady Luck has presented me with an opportunity, I shall not screw up. ' I decided. 'I shall come up with a reply so humorous and charming that she'll remember it for the rest of her life.' Humour has never been much of a problem. It's being charming that always has- more so for me than for anyone else.

'Very well, thank you' I replied, still unsure whether enamour was spelt with a 'u' or not. 'By the way, who are you?' Oh my God! I had done it again. Even by my standards, that was curt. She will now remember me as the rudest person alive, and rightly so too, I thought. 'I'm fine too,’ she replied. ‘Why didn't you call me up before you left for India?' She had misheard me! Talk about luck!

Everything seems to be going right. Despite putting up a mediocre performance United beat the Kops in their own den. Though I didn’t follow it too keenly, the Chennai Superstars, I heard, have won the inaugural ICL. What’s more, Liverpool have lost three games in a row, Chelski lost this weekend and John Terry is injured! I just hope the fairytale run continues.

As far as ‘I am Legend’ goes, it was quite good, though the CGI left a lot to be desired. The producers claim that they have spent a 100 mn $ on the movie. I seriously don't know where all that money has gone. In the opening scene, Will Smith is shown chasing a pack of 'deer'. I say 'deer', because those were the lousiest looking deer in the history of world, never mind Hollywood, cinema. Even stuffed toys would have looked more realistic! Otherwise, the movie was quite good thanks to a stellar performance from Will Smith (yeah, he can act too) and does full justice to the novel. Talking of screen adaptations of novels, 'The Kite Runner' is quite good too, though the pace is sluggish and I fell asleep twice. That has been the highlight of this winter-break. I have watched over half a dozen movies and, to varying degrees, they have all been brilliant.

While 'Stardust' is certainly one of the best fantasy movies ever, 'The Golden Compass' isn't too bad either. There haven't been too many good movies in Hollywood after the classic 'Return of the King', but Russell Crowe has set that record straight with two all-time great performances back to back in 'The American Gangster' and '3.10 to Yuma'. After the nightmare, ‘A Good Year’ and a couple of slack years, things are looking up for Crowe too. Hmmm... I don't seem to be the only one with whom Lady Luck is pleased.

P.S: To those of you haven't noticed, there is a new widget on the column to the right.
P.P.S: I have way too much free time too.
P.P.S: The title is intended as a reference to, and only to, my daily activities. Any allusions to a particular specimen of Cannis familiaris are purely coincidental.
P.P.P.S: I wonder if Gandalf would have a problem with my open plagiarism of his trademark ‘post-post scripts’.

Testing Times

2007-12-08T02:04:00.000+05:30

Fate has this annoying habit of laying out situations upholding Murphy’s Law just when you least want it to. Case in point: the last ten days of my life. Every time I thought things just couldn’t get worse, they actually did. There have been so many lows, I just can’t seem to pick one situation that I could call the lowest of the lows. That being the case, it was quite tough picking a topic for my new post (which, I hope, explains the hiatus.). But for sheer hilarity, one of them stands out.

‘Unforgettable’ is a funny word. For some reason, we have this tendency of presuming that it has positive connotations, though, quite often, it doesn't. Take my 10th grade Social Science text book, for example. If there is one thing from my school days that I’ll never forget, it is the amount I slogged to memorize the names (and spellings) of Bihu, Tamasa, Kalaripayattu and the three dozen other obscure tribal dances that CBSE thought we, as the future citizens of our country, must know. (Ironically, the names themselves were highly forgettable, but that’s a different matter altogether.) Thank God it was only the names that we had to learn, and not the dances themselves! (I wonder what my grades would have looked like then. Hmmm....) I always considered Social Science the single most ‘unforgettable’ thing that ever happened to me. I was proven wrong though, and the antithesis came in the form of EMAMI.

They say that life’s greatest gifts arrive incognito. I’m not sure about that, but I’m confident life’s miseries do. Take EMAMI, for instance. Quite a fancy sounding name for what was the most frustrating subject ever. I always hated EMAMI, but never with a greater fervour and vengeance than I did on the 23rd of November. The occasion was our final practical assessment, and as you would expect, nothing went my way.

Well, almost nothing. Though the coil of my energy meter got burnt and my circuit looked more like a board of Snakes and Ladders, I had managed to get a seat right next to the invigilator, which meant I got to hear every single question he asked during the viva-voce. (The fact that my roll number was the last in our batch helped too.) Thanks to some dextrous eavesdropping, I managed to overhear every single question he asked, and also the fact that he asked only one question- ‘Expand THD.’

My pulse started racing. I somehow managed to call up a friend of mine and, frantically, asked him the million dollar question. ‘It’s total harmonic distortion. You don’t even know that?’ came the reply. ‘Of course I do.’ I said. ‘I was just checking if you knew it too.’ I doubt if he fell for that, but anyway, my job was done. When my turn came, I walked up to the invigilator in a confident stride that might have seemed unbecoming of a guy who did not know the name of the text book, never mind the chapters in it. Ah, who cares? I knew the question, and I knew it’s answer too. These were ten marks that were well in my pocket already. Here's what followed:

Invigilator: “Good morning young man. You seem very confident.”
Me: “I sure am, sir.”
Invigilator: “Then I assume you’ve thoroughly studied your entire syllabus?”
Me: “By all means, sir.”
Invigilator: “Then, young man, would you please explain the concept of total harmonic distortion?”

Amen.

Of naps, yawns and Periplaneta americana

2007-10-20T07:18:00.000+05:30

Another TS has just passed, bringing along with it half a dozen highly forgettable grades that shall soon be forgotten, and all that shall remain as 'mementos' of the exams shall be the innumerable bakar (the R-land equivalent of 'chitchat') sessions we had. One such session was particularly memorable. It was at the Reptile's place, and as in most bakar sessions, one thing led to another, and we finally found ourselves discussing our electives in high school. I wasn't surprised by the Reptile's disbelief when I revealed my elective to him. Most people have reacted the same way, more or less, when they came to know that my elective was, put on your seat belts, biology!

What it was that made me pick biology is a mystery worthy of the investigative genius of Mulder and Scully. One thing I never told anyone back then, or ever, for that matter, is that despite all my lousy grades in biology, deep inside, I aspired to become a doctor. I don't know why. I suppose that's what watching Scrubs and reading Robin Cook does to you. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that I longed to have a steth around my neck, and in some deep corner of my ER-addicted mind, I still do. So, despite all that, why did I bunk PMPD (Pre-Medical something. Some exam you have to clear to make it to any medical college in the country.) and spend the day watching a dozen Lis and Wangs walk away with every single medal at the Asian Games, you ask? That is a question that would be answered better by any of the fifteen other bio students in class, or better still by our teacher (who, from now on, shall be referred to as, 'the May Bee'), who tried everything possible to get me studying. Alas, all her efforts went down the drain, and so would yours if you tried to get any of the aforementioned talking, as they are all mugging away to glory in different corners of the world. That means I get to narrate my story all by myself!

Biology classes were very interesting.... at least for the n-4 students who bothered to pay attention. For the quartet on the last bench, they were a laboratory of sorts, where they kept discovering new postures in which Homo sapiens could sleep. The quartet, here, refers to The Geek, The Freek and the Tweak (I have no idea what 'tweak' means, or if it is a word at all, but come on, I couldn't think of another word that rhymed.), and of course, me. Oh, and by the way, 'freek' hasn't been misspelt.

The fact that the others showed an over-zealous interest in the subject did not help our cause either. Not only did it make our lack of interest even more conspicuous, it also got on our nerves. On one occasion, I committed the blunder of sitting beside the God-of-the-Geeks, better known as PSK. It was an amazing experience, albeit a bad one. PSK, as always, was jotting down every single discernible sound wave that left the May Bee's vocal chords. 'She sneezed five minutes ago,' I muttered in sheer frustration, 'why didn't you note that down?' 'Why, of course!' came the prompt reply. Give me strength!

It has been my observation that, by and large, a person's knowledge of biology is inversely proportional to his sense of humour. I don't know how this works or why it is so, but, trust me, it's true. This explains why even some really lame comments like, 'there is a Periplaneta americana on my table' had the entire class in splits. This also explains the fact that though bio classes were okay to start with, eventually, they got corny enough to make Heyy Babyyy seem really funny (or should I say 'reallyy funnyyy').

In retrospect, I probably could have worked slightly harder. A lot harder, actually. But it's all for the better, I suppose. Had I done all that, I wouldn't have ended in this hell-hole we fondly call R-land, would I? Had it not been for the CBSE's absurd notion that guys who can cram a few hundred weird names that would all be worthy contenders for 'The World's Toughest Tongue-Twister' (try pronouncing Ophrys oxhyrrhynyis), and draw a dozen abstruse diagrams make the best doctors, I might have ended up in med. Alas, medicine was not fortunate enough.

To IIChE, his own....

2007-10-04T00:26:00.000+05:30

'Twas five minutes past twilight in R-land when the great disaster befell the quizzing community of the world at large and its R-land counter-part, LitSecTM in particular. Satan had turned up at quite a few LitSec events, and time and again, failed to make it to the finals. Intoxicated by a fierce desire for revenge, Satan disguised himself as a quiz, and using IIChE and Arihant Publishers as 'vectors' (yeah, I still remember some of the bio I learnt at school.) he unleashed himself upon the world. What followed was a quiz so lousy, that it is feared that traditional quizzes will lose their charm altogether. After all, when something gets lousy beyond a certain extent, people start finding it funny. (Watch a Bhojpuri film if you want proof of that.)

For more details on the quiz itself, visit http://thenameissushi.blogspot.com/2007/10/jeev-milkha-sing-meets-alfred-nobel.html

And just for the record, we won the quiz (where 'we' refers to The Politician, The First Bencher and me) and ended up spending nearly the entire prize money (which, by the way, was 1000 bucks. Not bad at all) on a treat at the Ravindra Canteen. Hmph!

P.S: Why did I post this, when all it practically is, is a detour to Sushi's blog, you might ask. Well, I wasn't happy with the detail Sushi laid on the fact that I won, and more importantly, self-glorification is something I've always enjoyed, and also something I haven't indulged in for quite some time now. Muahahahaha! I rock

One Night In The Capital

2007-09-26T04:26:00.000+05:30

“Desperado... Why don't you come to your senses?”, I crooned for the nth time that night, much to the chagrin of the Bulk and The Hairy Hick who were seated beside me. “I'm trying to catch some sleep here, you ass,” the Bulk cursed, and gave another of his huge, Neanderthal yawns. My habit of singing while travelling has gone down badly with quite a few people, which I must say, is not too surprising. Not that I sing badly. Out of touch, I guess, would be the right phrase. Sixteen more yawns, five 'chole'-vendors and four hours later, we found ourselves in the capital, thanks to a bumpy ride on the rickety Uttarakhand Parivaahan that we have all come to recognize. A bumpier ride on an auto-rickshaw and we finally arrived at our destination- IIT Delhi, and the occasion was their cultural fest- Rendezvous, which, for some reason, is attended (and mispronounced) by most of R-land.

Picture this- you are exercising your bowels early in the morning and halfway through, the taps run dry. Nonplussed? You wouldn't be, if you were an IITD student. Four years in a place like that, and you'll never find any situation in life complicated, thanks to their water-for-an-hour-a-day system and the weird nomenclature of their blocks (A-long, A-short, A-perpendicular, A-parallel, A-tangential, to name a few.). “It's 10, right? Hurry! 'The Best Chick in Town' must have started,” advised the annoyingly huge first-year localite whom the Hick knew beforehand owing to the fact that they were both from the same village. I say annoyingly huge because his 6 foot something height was giving me an inferiority complex. I looked like a schoolboy next to him. I look like a schoolboy next to most people, but even so, a first year?

Anyway, getting back to the point, 'The Best Chick in Town' was picked and awarded. What do you do when some of the hottest girls in the country stand right in front of you? Well, nothing at all, if you are either Dela or the Bulk. True to the spirit of LitSec, all we did was gape at each other. (Oh my God, there is something wrong with me! I must see a doc about this.) “Now what?”, we asked the first year, to which he went on to name a dozen other voyeuristic events. “Isn't there a quiz or anything of that sort?” I asked. “What sort of a geek are you?” came the reply. Proving that I wasn't a geek meant I had to endure a 4 hour long ramp show. Halfway through it, the Bulk fell asleep. “Lets get out of here,” I suggested. “No way! We have bunked classes to come here. There are events for two more days. We can't go back now!” is what I thought would be the Bulk's response. But I was wrong, though. All he said was, “Yeah, sure. Let's go.” In order to ensure that our trip to the capital wasn't entirely fruitless, we had a couple of pav bhajis and half a dozen chuskis just before we left. (And after all this, the Bulk still claims he's on a diet.) An hour later, we were in the same rickety Uttarakhand bus again.
“Desperado....”

The Knights At Fort Knox

2007-09-07T18:31:00.000+05:30

R-land has more than its share of absurd rules, none perhaps more ludicrous than the fortification of the sole domicile of the feminine half, oops, sorry, one-twentieth of the insti. What is perhaps even more depressing is that the same fate has befallen the Fachchas. RJB has become completely out of bounds for every single guy who, even remotely, looks like a sophomore. Despite all these huge hurdles that stood in their way, four valiant sophomores, viz. the Reptile Legend, iPot, The Bulk and Dela, took the task of sneaking into the fortress upon themselves. (Yeah, I often refer to myself in third person. It makes the narrative seem less boring.) 'One for all and all for one' was to be our motto, but we realized later that the P&I 2nd Year Batch had patented the tagline. (If you didn't get that, contact me, or better still, contact iPot.)

Like most dangerous expeditions, half our team chickened out at the eleventh hour. It was finally down to just the Reptile and me. At the stroke of nine, while the rest of the world prepared to go to bed, and the rest of IITR was busy planting bombs and detonating them, the two of us set out on our journey....

At the entrance of RJB stood our first hurdle, or rather MY first hurdle, as the Reptile had slipped away to Lipton with the pretext of getting himself a cup of coffee, leaving me all alone with the blood-thirsty security guard.

I found some strength in the fact that if I couldn't come up with a convincing story to get past this guy, noone else could. After all, I was Dela. 'Notice lagaana hai, bhaiya', I yelled to the guard, though my mind was still lost in self-admiration at the brilliant fib I had come up with at such short notice. The watchman, though, contorted his face and gaped at me as if I had just mumbled something in Swahili. 'Notice lagaana hai, bhaiya', I repeated, and this time, I even drew some sort of rectangle in mid air, in a desperate attempt to make the dolt understand. 'TV Room?', came the prompt reply. Disgusted, I was planning my next move. 'He doesn't understand me anyway. I might as well dish out a few of the many Hindi expletives I have picked up during my stay here', I thought. Just in the nick of time, the Reptile arrived, in true Bollywood-hero fashion and two minutes later we were in front of the mess that we all know and hate. Huge posters, in bright yellow, magenta and a dozen other gay colours, greeted us with the message, 'The-Act-That-Must-Not-Be-Named is Banned'. By the way, I'm avoiding the r-word as a security precaution. For all you know there might even be a clause in the SC Ruling that makes even the mention of the word a punishable offence.

The Reptile and I parted ways, as we set off for G33 and F46 respectively, in search of our progeny. I entered F46 and was distraught to find my former room with everything neatly stacked in its right place. What was worse, both my kids were busy studying! My legacy, it seems, has died away. My entry sent my 'betas' into a state of hysteria. They were suddenly were suddenly all, ‘Sir, bait jao, sir’, ‘pani lata hun, sir, ‘blah blah blah sir’ and so on and so forth. In an attempt to gauge my popularity among the fachchas, I asked them, 'Room Baap se mile kya?' I was not sure whether to be elated by the fact that someone had finally understood my Hindi or to be disappointed by the reply that followed. ‘Both our room baaps are useless wimps, sir. They both have pathetic GPAs.’ I was shattered. Damn these fachchas. Why do these guys reduce people to just a number? Son, indeed. I was beginning to hate both these creatures that had been thrusted upon my poor room. I decided to leave the room baaps topic aside, and went on to tell them a dozen tales from the days of yore- all starring, written, directed and narrated by Dela. Their naivete surprised me. I couldn’t believe my luck when they actually fell for the story in which I told them that I was responsible for the bandage that a certain Really Pathetic Man was sporting lately. I felt a sudden urge to reveal my true identity to them. ‘Luke, I am your father.’ I decided against it, though. After all, the moron had called me a useless wimp. Some day, I shall reveal myself to him, and while I’m at it, I might as well chop off his hand. May the Force be with me…

Tag Along, Folks!

2007-08-13T16:46:00.000+05:30

‘Lefty has Tagged you’, read the subject of the 3918th unread message in my mailbox. My cursor involuntarily moved to the ‘delete’ checkbox, when I received a scrap to the same effect. A scrap meant business, I decided, and off I went from one matchbox to the other, seeking the true meaning of the message, but my efforts were in vain. (My hopes soared when one of my floor-mates put on a ‘don’t-you-know-even-that’ kind of expression on questioning, but all he could come up with was, ‘A tag is that thing in shops on which prices are written.’ Duh!)

Either because I have been hanging around with too many geeks lately or because I myself have become one, I tried wikiing. (By the way, how do you spell that?) As always, it came up with over five dozen results, ranging from Tag Heuer to triacylglycerol. After a few cursory glances, I made a list of five ‘probables’. Deciding that it could neither mean ‘talented and gifted’ or ‘a type of metadata involving the association of descriptors with objects,’ I finally figured out that checking out Lefty’s blog would be a much easier thing to do. I found the answers to all my questions. Enlightenment, at last!

But, as I would soon realize, with enlightenment comes work, and it was then that I truly realized the depth in the saying, ‘Don’t ever go looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. In all probability, it is from an oncoming train.’ There was no turning back now, for I was the Chosen One, or rather one of the Chosen Eight. To quote Lefty, by being Tagged, I had just been inducted into a pseudo-elite group of bloggers who write random facts about themselves to either extol their inferiority complex driven souls, or just because they have nothing better to do.

You might, or rather, will, find this paragraph better written than the rest of the post. It is only because I, remaining true to the great lineage of ‘Taggers’, that I am now a part of, have shamelessly copy-pasted it entirely from Lefty’s post. The rules of Tagging, that now bind me, are as follows:

1. On being Tagged, the blogger must accept 8 as the answer to Life, Universe and Everything instead of the erroneous 42, and devote his or her energies in proving the same.
2. Having pledged to do so, the blogger must post 8 random facts about him/herself.
3. Next, the blogger is expected to enmesh 8 more innocent souls into the Tagged web. He must post a comment on their blog warning them of their fate and ensure that they have received his warnings.
4. A blogger who does not wish to accept the rules of Tagged on being Tagged would find himself in an imbroglio. It would be prudent for him to play along. If, however, he chooses to do a “Screw you guys, I’m a’ goin’ home”, he must remember that the Big Brothers of Tagged are constantly watching him and he would have earned their ire. Their favourite method of execution is to fill the bloggers mail/scrapbook/comments with Tags unless he of she loses his sanity or the will to fight, whichever is earlier.
537 words, and I still haven’t got to the point! Wow, I have grossly underestimated my ‘beating-about-the-bush’ capabilities all along. So, for those of you haven’t gone to sleep already, here are the eight random facts about myself:
1. Though I was christened Abhishek, for some inexplicable reason, the name has never stuck. I have had more than my share of nicknames- Tyson in kindergarten (though my savage behaviour in class had more to do with it than my biceps), Sundar in Middle School, (which, by the way, always got on my nerves. No offence meant, Dad, but somehow, I never liked your name much.) and of course, Dela ever since. I am tempted to narrate the story of how the name came about, but as it has already been repeated more often than the Bulk’s ‘Ding-dang-a-ding-dang’ drones, I won’t . I shall narrate it sometime, when I have completely run out of ideas for my next post.

2. I have this uncanny knack of tricking people into believing things that never happened- something some people, unfairly, call lying. ‘I do not lie. I make fables, like Aesop and those guys.’
3. Like all the others in my lineage, I love food, but unlike them, I am a big eater. (Maybe Lefty and Matty Boy have tremendous appetites too, but their sizes seem to suggest otherwise, right?) My gastronomic prowess has got me into many an embarrassing situation, the most noteworthy being the one that took place during a buffet I attended with my family. Seeing that the food was unlimited, I helped myself to what some might call a lot of food. The host saw my plate and commented, “What a good boy! He has brought food for his entire family.” Hmph!
4. Another fact that very few people know is that I am a reasonably good poet, though most of my poems, like Phoebe’s books, have only been read by me. I write only when I’m feeling terribly depressed, and so, I myself find most of my poems unbelievably soporific. I haven’t written for quite some time though, my last work being ‘Specs Appeal’, a self-consoling poem I wrote nearly half a decade ago, the day the ophthalmologist heartlessly broke the shattering news that I’d have to wear glasses for the rest of my life.
5. I am a huge football fan and have been one right since the days of Cantona and Schmeichel, though the JEE and CAS created a two-year hiatus in between. Manchester United-Arsenal games are huge rituals at home- awaited with bated breath by my Dad and me, and dreaded by my Mom, because whatever be the outcome of the game, it results in uproar. My living room has now been replaced by the Cautley TV Room, and my couch by an armchair thrice as old as me. I haven’t really had time to notice though, owing to the undivided attention that I give the game. Glory, glory, Man. United!
6. My tryst with music, sadly, hasn’t been a pleasant one at all. Despite my trying my hand at various instruments, my interest hasn’t lasted over a year. My innate singing talent, though, is undeniable and has made me the idol of most of my lesser-talented counterparts. (Readers are requested to refer to clause no. 2 again.)
7. Sadly, there is something in my face that makes me the hot favourite among the Gods of PJs- The Reptile, Jumbo the Junior, The Bulk and most importantly, The Grinning-Geek. (Lefty has been deliberately excluded from this list owing to the fact that he comes up with PJs come-what-may, whether or not I am present is secondary.)
8. Unlike Noida, there were no Kala Sangams in Bahrain, and so, my drawings have gained a reputation of being the worst of their kind ever. I have always avoided drawing whenever I could, but in the school where I studied, drawing was a compulsory course. (It wasn’t exactly compulsory, but we had to pick either drawing or dancing, so I had no choice.) On one occasion, we were asked to draw a horse, and while the others were still struggling to complete their pictures, I finished mine well in time. With pride written all over my face, I showed it to my teacher, only to be spanked by her. “Do you ever obey anyone?” she bellowed, “I asked you to draw a horse, not a dog!” I have never ventured into anything even remotely related to art ever since.
Now, on to the best part- the (un)lucky 8. And the winners are: The Reptile (the obvious choice), iPot (though whether or not he is a blogger is a debatable issue.), The Lazy Labrador (hope he gets out of his bed and reads this.), The Grinning Geek (Yep, he blogs too. Refer to the list of links on the right.) DeeKay (The Geek who Lived!), The Incredible Bulk (Yeah, I know he isn’t a blogger, but sorry, I don’t have a choice. I’m running out of people.), The Hirsute Hick (read previous comment.) and Bihari Potter (read the last two comments.) (Here’s a ninth fact about me: I am pathetic at HTML, and anything techy, for that matter. I guess that explains the fact that unlike Lefty, Matty Boy and my other predecessors, I haven’t provided links to the respective pages of the guys mentioned above. The inconvenience is regretted.) (And here’s a tenth fact: I use brackets quite often.) (And here’s fact no. 11: I can’t think of a conclusion for this post.)

Newton and the Mystery of the Moustache Twirl

2007-06-19T18:26:00.000+05:30

You are surrounded on all sides by thugs, each equipped with the highly advanced weaponry characteristic of the typical Bollywood henchmen, ranging from hockey sticks to cycle chains. What would you do? Run for your life? Call the cops? That’s probably why you’re not one of India’s biggest stars. The answer is elementary… All you have to do is twirl your moustache (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIz5pDMgS8k). Now, why didn’t I think of that? No wonder people keep complaining that IITians are technically dumb.

Here are a few more eye-openers:

· http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1lahm1IgZo : It’s Captain, again. Why bother with bullet-proofs when you can frown.
· http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_to_3zAhBf0 : To think, there are people still worried about the energy crisis. Who needs petrol, when we have, ‘Jai channakesava!’
· Sunny Deol in Gadar: I couldn’t find this on youtube, so I’m hoping you’ve watched the movie beforehand. Sunny is driving a truck, and oops, he’s crashed into a car and there’s a huge explosion. No sweat, the car’s gone, but the truck’s safe. The petrol in the car’s gas tank must have fuelled it. Oh no, he has crashed again, and it’s a vegetable cart this time. Another explosion? Err…well, I guess why Mommy made such a fuss about veggies.

Absurd, gibberish, nonsense…. My initial reaction was somewhere in between shame and outrage. I spent the next few hours grumbling about Bollywood, Kollywood and every other ‘wood’ I had heard of. Questions like, what kind of an image would this create about our country in the minds of foreigners, kept irking me.

However, with further thought came a sense of clarity as well as pride. I finally realized that we probably had the best film industry in the world. Come to think of it- the primary purpose behind making movies is to entertain, and a 20 second 'Captain' video is as funny as an entire episode of F.R.I.E.N.D.S. Newton would probably have hung himself had he ever watched any of these videos, a friend of mine comments. Well, probably, yes, but I doubt if he himself could have suppressed a grin.

Train Travail- The Desi Version

2007-05-22T21:52:00.000+05:30

It’s that time of the year again. Barely a couple of months have passed since we went back to R-land from our homes, and yet, our zest to return has not decimated one bit. People start making a wild rush for their tickets to civilization, and according to some unwritten law, the ones heading home earlier attain an exalted status. Statements like, “When are you leaving? 8PM? Pah, I’m leaving at 4!” are quite common, and invariably have the listener cursing himself for not booking an earlier train. The fact that four hours is a negligible period of time in a 100-day vacation is a thought that seldom crosses our minds.

After the entire hullabaloo about tickets, packing and, lest we forget, grades, we eventually return home. We return expecting a royal welcome, complete with your favourite dish for dinner and a smile on your dad’s face that says, “You’ve done it, son!” Much to our chagrin, the reception is lukewarm, to say the least. The entire family sports an expression that says, “You again!” After the mandatory, “You’ve grown so thin! Don’t they feed you well?” you’re left to yourself, longing for the welcome that never was.

This time round, though, there was a twist in the tale. No, there was no warm welcome this time either. It’s just that, in my case, the return was overshadowed by the journey.

Though it may seem inconceivable to the guys who know me now, there were days in the not-so-long-past times when I used to read books that weren’t all from the shelf that read, 'fiction'. The epoch of the studious Abhishek started and ended in my twelfth grade, and it was on one fine day then, that I came across an interesting analogy in one of the books that I have not spared a glance since the day I set foot on R-land. The analogy went thus: Picture yourself traveling by a bus. Your destination is A, and to get there, you travel by a deluxe bus with every facility possible. However comfortable your journey is, your memories will always be of A, and the things you did there, and not of the bus journey. A, here, is analogous to the concepts of physics, while the deluxe bus corresponds to mathematics. (I know the analogy is absurd and irrelevant, but I just want to prove that, contradictory to common perception, I can act geeky too.)

The analogy set my rusting gray cells working. I could never think of a situation where the journey could eclipse the destination, until I actually experienced it. As I mentioned previously, I was heading home by the earliest possible train. The fact that I had The Incredible Bulk for company meant I was assured of entertainment, food (courtesy Indian Oil Corp.) and a ride back home from the railway station (courtesy Indian Oil Corp.).

The journey of a thousand miles began with a single step and a three hour delay. Trains do incredible things to you. For the first time in over a year, I was up by six in the morning, though I had to go back to sleep as I had forgotten to bring along my toothpaste tube and the Bulk was still fast asleep. Eventually, I managed to wake up by ten, and much to my dismay, The Bulk was still fast asleep. Frustrated, I shook him awake. He responded with, “Ass, I have an alarm” with the simultaneous thrusting forward of his phone, while his eyes still remained tightly shut. Be it Seat 11, Tamilnadu Express or S46, Rajendra Bhawan, this was one universal action- unaltered by time, weather or location.
The Bulk eventually woke up a tad past the stroke of noon, which meant I could finally relieve my mouth of the appalling stench that a dozen hours of sleep brought with them. With no sign of any interesting events or people in my compartment, I got back to reading the novel that I’d brought along. The lunch cart came, and went. So did Agra, Bhopal, Itarasi and sundry other stations I had never even heard of. The Bulk was behaving strangely, oops, that’s not something new, is it? Let’s just say, he was behaving in a strange manner that was different from the strange manner he usually behaves in. Was this the real Bulk or was it some solar-energy-dependent-alien masquerading as the Bulk? Come on, this was the Bulk. The slightest mention of anything remotely related to food should have made his digestive juices itch for action. Instead, here he was, engrossed in (of all magazines!) Lion, our institute magazine.

As we crossed the dreaded Chambal Valley, I gave up on the Bulk, and decided to work on Mission Food all by myself. India is one hungry country. Nothing turns us on as much or as well as food does. The picture of a typical Indian station is incomplete without a dozen food stalls on the platforms. Traveling by a train passing through twelve states is one hell of a gastronomic experience. Nothing unites India the way food does. Apart from trains, that is.

Nagpur brought with it shrill cries of ‘meedo-soan papdi’ and two Indian Oil employees desperately vying with each other to impress the Bulk. In their attempts to do so, they brought us some food as well. Hang on a second, did I say ‘some’ food? It was enough to feed half a compartment. Though it was delicious, we could barely finish one-fourth of it. Thankfully, India has no shortage of beggars, and on this occasion, it was an old, maimed lady who turned lucky.

Another good night’s sleep later, I woke up at 7AM sharp. There is a common belief downsouth that the first thing/person you see after waking up determines how your day will turn out to be. If it is true, I must have a hilarious time today. I woke up to the sight of the Bulk lifting up and down each of his suitcases, one after the other. “I’m practicing now, so that lifting them won’t be a problem once we reach Chennai” was his explanation. Who needs comedians when you have the Bulk? Chennai Central finally arrived and so did a Ford iKon with the Indian Oil Logo on its bumper. There are some things money can’t buy. For every thing else, there’s Indian Oil.

Wor(l)d War II

2007-04-11T20:05:00.000+05:30

DISCLAIMER: All characters and events in this article are based on real people. Any resemblance to any person, dead or alive, is purely intentional.

No single person or event has contributed to our vocabularies as much as World War II has. From fascism to blitzkrieg, WWII jargons have become such an integral part of our vocabularies that we tend to forget their origin. However, many a noteworthy patois has remained lost in the ruck of such words. For me, two of them stand out- ‘little boy’ and ‘fat man’.

For some reason, the mention of these does not bring bombs to my mind. It reminds me of two entities I have known for quite some time, and yet, seem unfathomable to me. They are both quite similar to bombs; the only difference being that they are human (or so they claim). The two are a study in contrasts. The only common feature is that they both belong to an exclusive group of individuals, more commonly known as the Gang Of Geeks (GoG). Before going further into their respective characters, I should throw some light on certain concepts that one should be familiar with before analyzing these guys.

Allotropism, according to Morrison and Boyd, is the phenomenon by which an element exists in two or more forms, and more often than not interchanges reversibly from one form to the other under certain conditions. What has this got to do with the two specimens under analysis, you might ask. Though allotropism is generally exhibited only by elements, both these entities we discussed exhibit the phenomenon.

Take, for a start, Little Boy. He can be found in two allotropes- ‘giggle’ and ‘frenzied’. ‘Giggle’ mode, as the name suggests has each phrase prefixed and suffixed by a giggle. The topics he loves discussing include GoG, his grades, GoG, his professors, GoG, basketball and GoG. His favourite phrases include, “*giggle* GoG is *giggle* such a *giggle* cool group *giggle*” and, “*giggle* all my professors *giggle* love me *giggle*.” However, all his giggles are cut short by even the smallest of provocations, due to which he enters ‘frenzied’ mode. The frequently used phrases, in that mode, are too profane to be put up on a public portal such as this one.

Fat Man on the other hand exists in two avatars indistinguishable from each other, viz. ‘hungry’ and ‘very hungry’. His favourite phrase is “do you realize that,” though, the fact that uses it 493 times a day is something he doesn’t realize. Another interesting feature of Fat Man is that, though he never drinks, he sounds drunk after 8 everyday, and 8, here, refers to 8 AM. Fat Man-Little Boy confrontations are more entertaining than even an Indian Parliament Session, though they’re rarer. I was fortunate enough to overhear one such conversation the other day, and it was something of this sort:

FM: “HEEEEEEEEEEEYYYYY!!! There is a mosquito on your nose.”
LB: “*giggle* Why did that *giggle* need such a *giggle* huge ‘hey’ *giggle*?”
FM: “Ass! This place is full of mosquitoes. Do you realize that?”
LB: “This is what I hate the most about you guys. You just can’t stop cribbing. According to the Mosquito Manual, our institute has the lowest mosquito-to-student ratio in the country. In fact, GoG has……” (The lecture went on for another half an hour. (Un)fortunately, I fell asleep and missed the rest of it.)

Mush Matters

2007-04-09T15:51:00.000+05:30

There are some words in the English language whose origins seem to be more than just a mere coincidence. You get the feeling that the guys who created the words did so on purpose, in order to have a dig at whomsoever was concerned. Take the classic example of ‘board’- is it just a mere coincidence that it sounds uncannily similar to ‘bored’? I doubt it- the one who came up with the two words must have had a torrid time with his professors and must have come up with them to have a dig at his teachers and the words have remained in use long after his time. Why else do you think 'school' has a 'cool' in it while college has....err.....ummm.......'olleg', which is Swedish for 'nightmare.'

I was having a long chat with a friend of mine. He, like many of my other childhood friends, had mastered the art of impressing girls- the one thing that I’m worse at than even drawing (refer previous post). While discussing the tricks of the trade, he made a comment that it was all about being smart or something of that sort. I wanted to retort saying that it was just about acting mushy. I googled ‘mush’ with the hope of finding its ‘politically correct’ equivalent. And lo! It was then that I discovered this word that I certainly won’t forget for the rest of my life- bathetic.

For me, it was love at first sight. What a word! It was easily the most beautiful word I’d come across (though that isn’t saying much, considering my limited vocabulary). It wasn’t because it sounded like an adjective for a person who loves bathing. And it was certainly not because it sounded similar to ‘pathet’, which is Sanskrit for a ‘really cool way to live.’ (If you aren’t a F.R.I.E.N.D.S fan, you don’t deserve to live.) Move over Einstein, the guy who came up with ‘bathetic’ is the greatest genius to have set foot on this planet of ours. It’s just one word and yet, it conveys so much- you call the guy mushy and pathetic at the same time.

Studying in an all-boys school has been a huge handicap for me. Impressing girls is something I just cannot do now. Let us face it- all said and done, impressing girls is all about satiating their gigantic egos by saying the right stuff (read ‘mushy crap’) at the right time. This is something I am terrible at. (I was about to use a more ‘politically incorrect’ term for this, but well, I guess I’m finally catching up.) The other day I was talking to a girl with the sole intention of flirting with her. She was bragging about her new Limited Edition Avril Lavigne DVD (?!?!?!), for which she had shelled out fifteen hundred bucks. Any Casanova would have advised me to say something on the lines of ‘how lovely’ or ‘can I borrow it?’ or better still, just shut up. However, at that very moment, the DAVian in me took over, and I found myself saying, “What an utter waste!”

It is at moments like these that I regret my un-bathetic (grammatical error admitted and regretted) nature. However, one look at my neighbour’s poem to his girlfriend (“Roses are red, violets are blue…..”) is enough to make me take back my statement. How bathetic!

Picture-Imperfect

2007-04-05T11:09:00.000+05:30

There are times when you start wondering how you qualified as Homo sapiens in the first place. We all confront such situations day in and day out- during exams, when two IMG geeks get started on LINUX, and of course, at least for the elite gang that cannot ‘visualize’ stuff for nuts (which happens to be headed by me), during MD practical sessions. Like almost every other class, MD (short for machine drawing) classes are predictable, the only difference being that you can’t even take a nap. It starts with a session of blank stares at the labyrinthian diagrams in the sheet, hoping against hope that Einstein hadn’t died decades ago and would come to your rescue that very moment. This session seldom lasts over ten minutes, except during the week immediately after the Mid Sems, when we make (and subsequently break) resolutions to ghiss for an hour a day, never taapo (IITian for copying blindly) tutorials and so on and so forth. I finally come to terms with the fact that MD was never meant to be understood by subhuman minds like mine, and find solace in Snake, the once-ubiquitous mobile game, delighted that there are things in the world that make sense even to me. After an hour of furious gaming, I copy the nearby ghissu’s (IITian for nerd) sheet without the slightest clue about sections, projections or……sorry, I don’t know any more MD jargons. Does ‘snake’ count as one?

PS: Just for the record, this crap was also written during an MD session, when I’d got bored of snake.

Y.A.W.N (Yet Another Wanton Night)

2007-03-22T16:34:00.000+05:30

DISCLAIMER: The title of this article refers to the archaic form of the word ‘wanton.’ The author does not take responsibility for any misinterpretations, vulgar or otherwise.

There are (n-1) blogs on the web with bloggers prattling on day in and day out on how their day turned out. Unfortunately, this is one thing I just can’t do even if I wanted to for the simple reason that every single day in my life is pretty much like the one preceding it.

My day starts at 7.50, which is quite late considering the fact that classes start at 8, and after a quick brush and an occasional bath, I’m off to the mess in less than 8 minutes. One look at the menu is all it takes to make me skip yet another meal. That’s one of the few good things about our mess- it doesn’t let you waste time on trivial stuff like eating. The cycle journey to the lecture hall is a cumbersome task made even tougher by the steep slopes which make you jealous of the guys on the Tour de France. They get paid millions for doing the same task that you do everyday without reward, unless you could call a couple of boring lectures ‘incentives.’

I make the most of my lectures to catch up with all the sleep I’d lost due to the midnight footy games and bakar (translation: chitchat)-sessions. The entire afternoon winds on in the same fashion, with the only intermission coming in the form of a lunch break, which isn’t something I look forward to either thanks to the exciting mess menu, which consists of aloo, aloo and more aloo (translation: potato).

For some reason, from time immemorial, sunrise has symbolized hope and sunset, the end of all joy. In my case it’s the exact opposite though, as, to me, dawn symbolizes lectures and dusk, football. After two hours of football, I return to my room, determined to study for at least an hour. Before I’ve read even a single page, I’m informed that there’s a bakar session in some adjacent room and as usual, I’m only too eager to join.

Considering the fact that I never sleep before 3, you might make the mistake of thinking that I must be having enough time to study, despite the footy and bakar sessions. Well, I don’t, though I myself don’t know why.

To quote Ronald Reagan, "hard work has never killed anybody, but why take a chance?"

It's a Mad(du) World

2007-03-13T17:05:00.000+05:30

"Why did you come here?" "Why didn’t you go to IIT Madras?" "Do you celebrate Diwali down south?" "Have you watched a Hindi movie before?" "This must be the first time you’re tasting a roti, right?" "Do you know who Shah Rukh Khan is?" These are just a few of the innumerable annoying questions I had to dodge on my arrival at IIT Roorkee for committing the crime of being born a maddu (for the non-IIT junta, that’s short for madrasi.). I was seriously contemplating responding with something on the lines of, "For God’s sake, I’m from South India. Not from South Antarctica!" But I never mustered the courage to do so, and hence, the questions kept coming.

However, the greatest problem I’ve faced as a maddu in non-madduland is my knowledge of Hindi, or rather, the lack of it. Even simple sentences like, "bhaiya, do samose" in my maddu-accented Hindi are enough to have my batch-mates in splits. The Hindi problem is mutual- I don’t understand their Hindi, and they don’t understand my……well, can I call it Hindi? Hindi numbers are one thing I’m confident I’ll never manage to master all my life. Why can’t they have some amount of logic behind them? Why do they have to be as absurd as they are? Well, had they not been absurd, they probably wouldn’t have been Hindi. What else can you expect from the language in which a chair is female, whereas a table is masculine? (Okay, I know I’m going to get killed for writing this. Cops! In case I’m found dead, my murderer will, in all probability, be a guy from F47, F42, S46 or G54.)

But being a maddu has it’s advantages as well. While my less fortunate counterparts from other parts of the country shuddered at the thought of leaving RJB during the ragging season, I didn’t have to fret about any such thing. I never bothered about following the ‘dress code’ either. I had a secret weapon to hold off seniors. Every time a senior came up to me with orders like, ‘intro de’ and ‘dress code pata nahin hai kya’, I put on a blank expression and said, "I’m from Chennai. I don’t know Hindi." in the most pronounced maddu accent I could manage. Either due to my poor Hindi or his poor English, or a combination of both, I was left scot-free every single time.
Eight months have passed since my arrival here. I have stopped looking desperately at the calendar and counting the number of days I would have to survive before I could get home. Even my roomie has finally stopped recording my Hindi. At long last, I think I have become an IITR-ian in the true sense. I’ve been proven wrong by my canteen guy though, who’s telling me that I owe him ‘unathis rupaye.’ That’s thirty nine bucks, right?

Song of the Crow

2007-03-13T10:37:00.000+05:30

DISCLAIMER: This is the work of a 13 year old guy, with whom I have nothing in common except for the name, and though I know that this thing is utter crap, it holds a special place in my heart for sentimental reasons. Any criticism of this piece shall lead to dire consequences.

Once upon a time (talk about cliches!) in Crow-Asia, there existed two provinces- Cawland and Bawland, ruled by the short-tempered Caw and the Machiavellian Baw respectively. Despite their fierce rivalry in all fields (there was an annual Crow-lympics held between the two provinces), the two regions coexisted peacefully. While Cawland was rich in grains, Bawland was blessed with millions of mice, and hence, the two nations signed (with their beaks?) an MoU according to which Cawland would receive 800 mice, in return for 100kgs of grains. The trade flourished amicably, until one fateful Sunday.

Cawland had exported their due share, but in return, they had received only 798 mice. Caw was aghast. Being the brusque person that he was, he immediately declared war on Bawland.

The war went on for years. The two sides seemed evenly matched in every manner. Just then, Baw used his cunning, and made the Commander-in-Chief of Cawland betray his country by offering him lifelong supply of the finest mice in Bawland.

The Commander fell for the trap. Cawland was conquered and Caw imprisoned. After a trial, he was given the worst punishment a crow could possibly get----- he was fed to humans.

Caw had been a mighty ruler and a legend in his own right. yet, he met a disgraceful end because he lost his temper over the absence of a couple of mice. That is why, when crows see humans quarreling over the most frivolous of issues, they sing, ''Caw, caw" to remind us of the fate of Caw. Will we ever learn from the song of the crow?

Contemplations of a Homesick Soul

2007-03-13T09:28:00.000+05:30

DISCLAIMER: This piece was written by a jobless, homesick soul, and hence, reading it is a complete waste of time. It is the most (and probably only) senti piece I've come up with, so pleeeeeez appreciate the effort.

When does one start missing home? Is it when they miss the people, the familiarity, the actual buildings and houses that give structure to the memories? Or is it simply a fear of further adjustment and change? I can't say I miss home, I wouldn't consider myself homesick. I miss people of course, I miss little things about Chennai such as the dosas, marina, and footy matches. I think about the people, my family, my friends and classmates all of whom have made little niches for themselves in my heart and mind. It's sad not to share things with them anymore, and all the while I'm carving new niches for new friends who will be equally hard to leave in a few years. And when does a friendship grow to be strong enough to support something of this great magnitude, the distance and the pain because of the distance? Who do you keep in touch with, who do you choose to remain a part of your life. How far can an email go to maintaining a friendship? How deep is deep enough and how long is long enough? When is the trust built strong enough to share these feelings with people around you? When all you really need is a hug and a pat on the back, who do you turn to when your entire world is new and you're simply trying to remember what brought you to this place in life? It's times like these you look inside to memories to keep you happy, you look to new friends for renewing laughter and you look at yourself for the strength to keep it together when everything may simply fall apart. It takes a different kind of strength, a different kind of trust, a different kind of patience, to do what, I'm not sure, but all I can tell you is that it is different. It just feels different. No one said it would be easy, they just said it would be worth it. They were right, they are right, it is beyond worth it. I wouldn't change it for the world - because right now, I already have the world. And the fact that it isn't easy rarely crosses my mind, I'm too busy making it all worth it.

New Kid on the Blog

2007-01-06T15:19:00.000+05:30

Ahem..... Yeah, this is my first blog and though I still don't see the point, here I am typing down everything that comes to my mind, too lazy to even bother about making sense. Why am I blogging despite my 'what-a-waste-of-time' kind of attitude towards it, you might ask.. Well, it is primarily for this reason that I've started blogging. With everyone from my dhobi's son to the RJB canteen guy blogging already, my pride is at stake. I have to show that I can waste my time better than anyone else. I'm an IITian, you see, a world beater in everything that's got nothing to do with acads. With that brief (and boring?) intro, here I am, all set to step into the world of blogging............(appaluse please?!)