Ikkatees Maar Khan

The new year is approaching, and it's only expected of me to turn a little nostalgic. Or was that 'santimentalle'. The new year marks turning on the lid on a box of memories, some good, some bad, all mingled together and enclosed air tight. I know, it's only in retrospect that I'll get to enjoy them, the fact that someday I will ,is satisfying enough.

2010 was enough adventure for two years together, more so , it sort of compensated the monotony that college life has inflicted. I should  but I wouldn't talk about the past. For a change, I'm going to zoom ahead and try  asking myself, what I expect from the year ahead . It's a dangerous thing to make public, but unless I make a conspicuous assumption that nobody's reading this blog, I'm unable to write anyway, so I'd rather take the risk.

Of all things, I've ever longed for, I just hope that this year, I get , what they simply call : Satisfaction. 


Cheers 2011.

Quantum Mechanics

It's 7:50 by my watch. The usual things have already been done the very usual way. Tea had and investments discussed. Newspapers sought and kept gleefully over the side table. Menu for breakfast fought over, decided, then changed, decided, fought over, decided, changed , decided. Playlists pondered upon punctiliously,and put on hold. Blankets folded inside out. Milk bought and kept in the kitchen. Spectacles cleaned and looked into. Sounds irritatingly mechanical, doesn't it?

I think , it's just cliche to abstain from a mechanical way of life. It's probably not the 'cooler' spontaneous way of living, isn't it? The only quote that strikes my mechanical senses right now is that "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". When I look at my life with an eye of scrutiny , holding more than just a magnifying glass, I find beauty in this mechanical living. No, I'm not saying it to justify anything. What do I have to prove to you, but my stupidity? and this instant, I don't care if I manage to too. 

While the world perceives this sub-conscious affinity for an order to be a personality trait, and definitely not a good one at that, I think I see it as if each day is a new play in the same theater. How do you draw parallels, if the theater keeps changing? In other words, how do you get to know if the day was good or bad, if there isn't an underlying benchmark of sorts. 

It might be that you haven't realized, but you were swear by a mechanism too, you just don't know it as yet.The maggi you had every time you were up till four . The decent cup of tea, every time you needed a break. That one mechanical phone call to a friend, just to know if he/she still existed. It's all so , for the dearth of another word, mechanical.

If only you could get when I say : There is beauty in order, a beauty in mechanical life. Why? I don't know. Reminds me of another quote: " Beauty is in what cannot be defined."

  

The Evil in me

There have been instances, when the mind thinks completely off track. By off track , I don't mean abstract, it's something else. It's like a diabolic intention running parallely inside me. This intention, so to say, I have come to term, the evil in me.

Now, the evil , may be harsh, but it's hidden. Never at the look of perfectly sane human, would one realise the presence of such devilish tendencies.Well, there's a good chance that it might be just me, or that you're yet to accept that the evil exists in you too. The crux is, how deep and how potent this evil in you ,is. That's precisely what might make the difference.

How one perceives the insidious devil , is a figment of your own fertile and febrile imagination. I look at it as an efficient way to vent out anger. The mind , as such, is this cage, where you can exhibit yourself to be anything you want to be, have split personalities, malicious intentions, and still sneak away fallaciously. Isn't that enough? Sometimes, it is but then, only sometimes.

It's okay for me to write about this, because I'm direly confident, that this as a phenomenon is common to one and all. There's a devil in all of us, that gets aroused at the slightest of injustice, the minutest of ridicule, and even at the premonition of conspiracy.

So, the question arises: Just because there's an evil in us (yes , us !) , does that make us bad people , in general ? Isn't it just fine, or if I may say, even more fine ( the grammatical error is intended), to be satisfied having taken revenge in the corners of one's own mental cage? That again is a matter pure perception. Some people like the real, one on one thing much better.

As for me, I think I'm pretty cool with assassinating people mentally in the most imaginative of ways. The one thing I do sulk about though, is that none of my adversaries have given me the provocation to do the real thing. If only , I had enemies worth a fight. Sigh.

Ex Why Said

Now I do realise, that the last post was a bit- for the dearth of a better word, blunt. Amongst rejoicing girl friends, are frowning friends, that keep it no secret, that they wouldn't have had the guts to say all this on a blog. " I keep a personal diary for that " he says. My reply: Chubbe .( yaar, bura mat maanio, varna main ro doonga)

But I do agree to an extent, that the girlfriend - the metaphoric " love of my life " ( while she competes fo the title with a few - no not women, but edible delicacies), needs to be kept out. Out of the blog I meant.

Now, for a good twenty seconds there, I wondered why I added the last sentence. Vaise main thoda darpok toh hoon hi, yes, self confessed. The lesson is, no matter how verbose a conversation it becomes, never forget to add the vital words. "Kept out"  and "kept out of the blog" , could have made a difference.

Now it suddenly struck me, what a blog like this could do to you. It could establish you as the " intellectual" , given cutting/copying and pasting from an ageing intellectual blog has never caused you to reintrospect your moral conscience. Though, I am yet to do that, but you wouldn't believe me , would you?

Also, the blog might as well, refurbish your "lover boy" image. It's only when you come back to your room , heavy headed , with drooping shoulders, having spent the entire day with "her" ( don't make me say the word again and again), that it dawns on you, " Aaj toh compliment dena hi bhool gaya !", followed by a well fretted " Ab kya hoga ?" followed by a further fretted, " Kahin kuch ho naa jaaye!". This, my friends, forces our variety of boyfriends, to turn on the table lamp and wield our mental pen, like stilletto dipped in red colored vitriol, that too in a heart shaped ink pot.

I do agree though, that the very post may look obnoxiously silly the following day, but then it establishes another side of you: "He's silly ,he's normal" , followed by a handshaking of links, with an underlined message: "Look look, he's so mad about me !!". Now I, the silly, can only smirk at that. No, not derogatorily.

Kuch soch rahe ho? Arre sahi soch rahe ho. I've been gifted my creative freedom. I can write and she won't feel offended. I can already imagine myself to be in the shoes of Kishore Singh, whose USP is to bitch about his wife in the newspaper. I can sense, that we're deriving this satonical satisfaction, though he's being paid to do that and I'm not. And you do get, that while this post started of with "keeping the girlfriend out", out of the blog I meant, it has been , more inevitably, about her . Such is life.

The 13th will always be special !

To have completed five months of consecutive 'committed' life is, though mutely, a matter of solitary self congratulation. As you'd get already, that I would otherwise not have the courage to pop out of my pretentious 'corportatism', so I thought I'd rather exploit this space and speak my mind more uninhibitedly. What do I have to lose anyway, besides a girlfriend ? :-P

Sometimes, it seems , it happened just yesterday.  It's like a dream you wake up from, and then realise, that it wasn't one. The last five months have been jittery, not on the romantic front, but at life's end in general. Placement(mine) on the prowl. The ever bugging CAT(hers). I guess, all this was a bit hectic on our ,so far educational, romantic life. We must have spent more hours on the pretext of studying, than any , even mildly, romantic couple might have liked to. Can't say for you people, but I think studying together is the cooler way of romancing. You may think otherwise, but not here, it's MY blog.

So, five months in a relationship, and I've become a little more sensitive. The littleness may range within 10 exp(-9) and 10 exp (-10). No matter how complacent you are , while commited, there's always this perpetual need to express that " Aayee doo Kayer !". Not that I mind. On the contrary, it's always reciprocated. That's the best part. Any non-commited people reading this ? Shame on you. Go , get committed. :-)

It just dawned on me that in the usual blabber, I forgot the main thing. It's the 13th. I could never have imagined , that every and I mean every 13th would give me something to recollect, somthing to rejoice, something to just lay back and smile about, something that would give me both, the audacity and the authority to tell myself :" One heavenly day , you went somewhere, and then the best thing that could've happened to you, happened. It was the 13th of that month."

Happy five months. You are awesome, both technically and otherwise, and I'm loving it ! (Don't laugh )

 

The First Winter Chill

The one thing I've always liked about the winter chill is the silence it inflicts. Despite the mundane voices that keep surrounding me time and again, I'm able to find this so called 'Comfort in Silence'.

Lately , life has been this cocoon of opportunitites and difficulties alike. It's like waking up from the grave , in which you'd been lying dead since ever, and then suddenly finding yourself dancing in a marriage procession. I am not to be blamed, if I don't make sense right now, because for once I don't want to.

It's never happened to me earlier, that I wanted to put in a line and I couldn't think of one. This is what frightens me the most. The fact that I'm unable to make out why this is happening is all the more pinching. It's like a needle in your digestive system . You know it's there, you can't stop eating, and the pain wouldn't stop either.

No, I'm not depressed, and I'm not pretending to be some self introspecting intellectual either, I know I'm not that type, and people only know it better. I'm not here to write stories, but frankly. if I come to writing my own, I know it'll be quite interesting.

Before my half sensitive senses provoke me to add something sillier to this post, I'll pull the plug on my phonetic mind. A request to the counted two- three who might read this. Please don't discuss this post with me.

The Usual Stuff

So , it's a matter of discrete chance that I'm still up at this hour. Surprising ? Yes, from now I'm on this stringent resolve to annihilate any preconceived prejudices that you may have about me. It's just good fun to not give you what you were expecting.

Since I did take an implicit vow to keep polluting this blog ,periodically that was , I'm back to the dungeon of dark thoughts. For a change , I'll talk about the usual good stuff. 

For a while now, things have been straight. Girlfriend No. 32 ( '10 -...) is trying to figure out if I'm a 'psychological marvel'. I'm sure , I'm taken more as an out-of-the-box case study these days. Friends are perceiving me less gay. Truth prevails ! Academics are at their usual worst, as ever. Nothing new. Controversies are at their bare minimum. Sigh.

So, what is the usual stuff ?  I'm trying to figure out. I'm missing my old laptop for sure. It was slow, bulky , hard to carry, but I still have an affinity for it. I've switched to this swanky new mini, and I can only pretend to be satisfied. So, you could have probably guessed where I'm spending my first month's salary. What were you expecting? Gifts . Tch Tch .. TEE SEE AECH.

My old laptop was the saree clad "Sati- Saavitri" , the new one, as the name ( Hp- mini) suggests, is more the mini skirt clad Savitri , with absolutely no intention of being Sati. The old one was boring , the new one's flashy. The old one had three keys waiting to pop out, the new one , so far, has no such tendencies.

But then, I wake up at this god for saken hour , and decide to do something to "add value" to myself (Yes, Gf No. 32, you heard it , "add value".) , this laptop does not even throw in the right vibes. I want my Sati Savitri back. But, I don't want to let go of this pretty bombshell either. She was Bipasha, this is Mallika. She was love, this is lust. She was excitement, this is curiosity.

And yeah, the figure '32'. I mean, that's a bit of an exaggeration. But only a bit. Sigh.

CTC

It's highly probable that the first thing that comes to your mind at the very mention of CTC is the cost to company. It's okay. The placement session does that to almost everyone. In this context however , the intended meaning is Cut the Crap.

If I could opt not writing the last post , I wouldn't. Forget about all that " niether do I deserve nor do I intend to" part. Sometimes I wonder how melodramatic I can become by the most trivial of issues. Though I do agree that the triviality of the issue is again, a matter of personal perception. In retrospect, it seems pretty trivial to me.

But then flouting a " girl's emotional routine", that was really the limit. I mean, what was I even thinking ? An emotional routine ! It's not as if I thought that girls took out some time every day to crib over issues or something. I seriously didn't. But  then you got to agree, it's funny to imagine a girl having one, an emotional routine I meant. While I may pretend to laugh at it upfront, from the inside ,there's this echoing voice which keeps repeating itself with a marginal essence of insult, as you might have guessed : Abe Gavaar !

But then, the heart is a child ji .Yes, I've heard the song too. And from now on, I'll be blogging more frequently. I believe my 'vella-city' is positively correlated with the velocity of my blog posts.

Random Floods

Yes, I'm being honest to myself today. I'm being honest enough to convince myself that something's wrong , not only with me, but the entire world around me. It's like a turn table, the ups and downs ,I meant. Unlike other posts, this post isn't just another attempt to improve my grammar. I believe I'm past that stage now. It's the other side of life that I seem to have a problem with.

Fairly tales are meant to have a happy ending. My tale is just about managing its twists and turns. The past few days were like this hot cup of tea, that I intend to make for myself, for the drenched and vivid position I am in, the cup of tea which you enjoy rather gradually, sippping each moment as and when it comes, and savouring it alongside. I forgot though, that tea would eventually lose its sweetness.

I remembered having pondered upon getting into a relationship. Apart from the usual perplexity of  recieving a yes/no, there was another perpetual insecurity that kept bothering me. It was 'me' and my unanimously criticized traits. Some things are etched in one's curriculum like they were a part of an underlying mentality. I think it's this underlying mentality that I've come to both question and introspect.

Things change, so do circumstances. Many would believe I'm in a superfluously 'enviable' position,I guess, only I know how terrible I feel right now. There's a common adage in the stock market, in fact it frequents the business newspapers too much : Diversify your assets. Nothing and nobody in this world is entirely dependable. It seems quite ironic to me to have fallen into this trap,( for I aspire to be a risk manager someday) where I became so emotionally dependent on one person, that even a moment of ridicule can push me into the darkest pit ever. At this instant, I feel more of a rejected person in general , than a dejected boyfriend.

I guess, in this frenetic quest to achieve a 'personality' , I've started losing myself as a person. It's not something I repent. Whatever achievements I can boast of today, are a consequence of this, but at the end of it there's this hollowness, the kind that makes you feel that there's a vaccum.

I've never liked sharing too much with people. It has always been scary for me to let people know more about me. That's precisely why I've always avoided falling back on people. To be honest, I've never really found anybody that trustable. Given the current scenario however, I've started putting it in another way: I am just too vulnerable myself. Behind my tall predicament, lies a taller ego, and a staunch insecurity that compells me to keep to myself, for an iota of ignominy and I might just lose myself to a sullen delirium.

It's very frustrating to know that I've disrupted a girl's emotional routine. I feel guilty already. The next time perhaps I'll just keep to myself. If the only girl I ever cared for couldn't get my thinking in four months, then I believe, and yes I strongly do, niether do I deserve nor do I intend to get into a commitment. I think I'm just unfit to be in one.  

Analysing emotionality

The last time I enriched this blog with my non-sense , it was more than a month back. It seems, that in my melancholy , I've ridiculed this blog, what I've come to call, the chamber of secrets ,completely out of my curriculum. But now, that the emptiness it inflicts on me, proceeds intolerable levels, I'm irked, if not forced, to put in a few strands of my sullen self.

Be it, as it may, I've been offered the position of a business analyst, or in more general terms, an analyst. A part of my job, if at all I join , would be to interpret data, to resurrect trends that were inconceivable to the naked eye, to discover hidden pyscholology that stretches beyond the usual plethora of commom sense.

So, I was thinking, that it's only natural to start off with a self analysis of sorts. As a study, it stands neck to neck with my ostensible clamour in every interview I've faced so far : " I see myself as a self marketing product, which is constantly trying to add value to itself. "  Now for once, I'll get to mind my own business, much more professionally. ( Mind the repition. I've just been too boastful of the Business Analyst title.)

Hemmed with bubbling curiosity, as and when I endeavor to create a mood graph for myself, I'm unable to unearth any conceivable pattern in it. Not that I was entirely unaware of this trend, but , yes I should agree, this as an unusuality in emotion has constantly threatened my composure, which then and eventually worms into an inevitable , and often, worthless self introspection. Such volatility often reminds me of the stock markets, the trends of which I barely manage to skim through every morning. Being emotional , is one thing, and being impassive , is another, but from what it looks, I belong to a rather dynamic variety, the kind that shifts personality , like shifting clouds. It reminds me of that song from Music and Lyrics, a line of it was something like: " I wake up with a cloud above my head.." Yup, a cloud it is. A cloud above my head.

Coming to terms with the whole thing, I realise that I've done reasonably well, concealing myself in an impenetratable shell, that gave me both the authority and the audacity to have so much to say , and still not express it. But all that I know now, is that things have changed, and it's only direly anticipated of me to change accordingly. Isn't that a dilemma ? I mean, years of apathy can't just shy away in months, can it? That said, I think , I've lost a lot, coping with this apathy, so much so, that sometimes I prefer to blurt out unreal, forced emotions with an ingenuous risk of getting caught on the wrong foot.

While I spend this night in my hostel room, enjoying the wind that seems to cuddle my hair, and the prevailing noises in the corridor, that give me an impression of standing in a fish market, I seem to ask myself this one question: How could I be so heartless?, how could anybody be that heartless?  The song plays in an infinite loop on my laptop( Heartless- The Fray) , only seems to echo this question. And I do, what seems to be the only thing I can do about it, think .

In the moment

It's 9 pm on my watch in this soothing windy night , and I am already a pizza and a beer old. Not only did I thwart my own resolve to not to drink , but in a sense, I cheated myself too. Not that I feel guilty of doing so. This , as an event , was simply on the cards , and it was as much unavoidable, when I came to hostel, the card however lied hidden somewhere behind that translucent curtain of morals and ethics.

The post was not supposed to be an idiosyncratic lecture on the dichotomy of a guy with " morals and ethics" , having the time of his life roaming around , while companies line up for placements in the weeks to come. But now, that I've mentioned it , I think I'll elaborate it , keeping in mind the tolerance of my supposedly invisible though palpable audience.

Morals and ethics , as an epithet , it sounds like " music and lyrics" , doesn't it ? One goes hand in hand with the other. Standing like a hedonist , on the top most floor of my life, that gives me a bird's eye view of the whole situation, I think " morals and ethics" for me , have been inevitable reduced to a swanky composition of words. It's the one excuse you can always give, to not have been able to do something , that may have been considered immoral. The fact that , you were unable to do it , stays hidden in your subconscious.

As is commonplace, I am unaware of why I am writing all this, may be I'll try to justify the booze I've had , by claiming to have sprinkled some of my inebriation in the post that I am writing. I'm totally aware , that it will be a transparent case of anachronism , when my cliche audience ( You!) gets to read this, and it might be that this post may look impeccably irrelevant then, but believe me, these are words, words from the bottom of the heart, from the bottom of the heart of a middle class guy, from the bottom of the heart of a middle class guy who's a wee bit too drunk , from the bottom of the heart of a middle class guy who's a wee bit too drunk and who feels a little, if not more, helpless. I guess , it's all in this moment.  

The Handicap

I knew the moment would come some day, the moment, when I laid back in my comfortable chair yet again , ogled at the screen of my ,so far, vulnerably faithful laptop and put in a few words. Of all the fears I have , because of the insecure individual I am , the fear of losing the ability to write is not only the most architypical but also, the most gruesome. Even the faintest thought of waking up one day, and not being able to pen a few words, be it consciously or by mere intent, is similar to losing a sense, something like turning deaf, dumb or even blind for that matter. The physical ramifications apart , not being able to express oneself in words is a handicap I never really want to succumb to.

I realize sometimes , the academic benefits of writing. I try to keep them on a different weighing , for those reasons might have forced me to continue writing , they were not why I started writing in the first place. Words when put in honestly , are a transparent resemblance of how grim and glum the mental persona is. There would be times , when I wrote just to be diverged to think about something else and it used to be difficult , for I lacked a substance of controversy , but that surely wasn't the reason I got myself into it.

When things waddle in the mind like entangled threads, one is forced to stretch them out in something like a blog. It's understandable that the fear of being in that situation of mental nudity is grossly embarrassing. But then , come to think of it , how can and what will it take one to debug the system. Perhaps the fact that I am writing now , at dawn , when the sunlight just appears to break into my room , is not intent , but a need, an incomprehensible bug in my system.

The experience of vomiting a few words is a vindicating exercise. As a phenomenon, it's always surprising , that the first 200 words flow out as if they were waiting superfluously under my skin , waiting to catch their breath as and when they're exhaled on to the blog , of course with the benign benefit of technology.

It feels immensely satisfying that something came out today, even though I had expected to blurt something more belligerent. But , so can be seen in everyday life, I am at my parsimonious best as ever , even at words. Now, that's ironic!    

Blog Review : Part I

When I rewind the tapes to the day , I made an effort to create this blog , I am forced to acknowledge the changes I've been through . For somebody who had never even managed a simple "letter to the editor" without an incongruous error, maintaining a blog seemed to be a bluntly out of proportion ambition. I knew, if at all , it would be anything, it could only be a personal diary.

The first semester in college was an elementary introduction to the world outside. Sitting in a corner seat , with a subtle yet unnoticeable sense of observation , my eyes kept taking a 180 degree view of the classroom, something very similar to the iterative movement of your air conditioner duct. I remember telling myself , " this is where it all starts". Social interaction had never been my simple glass of water, my ingenuous cup of tea or my extravagant bottle of wine . So there I was, sitting in the same seat every day , watching people , perhaps waiting for my turn to speak , my shortcut to fame . We all have it in us , don't we? It's only human to accept. I did. Yes, it was something I wanted to be, that I kept hidden from watchful skeptic eyes , though I doubt I was ever given a second look by anybody. I wouldn't say , it bothered me . Going unnoticed , is something I've come to like , more subconsciously over time. The ambition was strong, confidence was high and the notion that there's absolutely nothing to lose was almost indelibly etched in the mind.

In the very first maths class that I attended, it dawned on me , that I've just been thrown from one pool of competition to another. I was still the unaware fish which had switched to a smaller yet deeper pool, while the hunting fishermen had only changed face. I must confess , it was disappointing at the first look. Going with the momentum , or walking with the herd , as it is called more pejoratively, was pretty much apparent. The proverbial hunks with swanky T-shirts would be curtain lifters , show stoppers , trend setters, whatever you may call them. They walked in and out of classrooms with an equally swanky herd of people ,gathering the oomph of the females, and wanted to ridicule anything and anybody at the slightest opportunity. With the benefit of size and weight, I was privileged to be left alone from the usual bullying , and was approached only in circumstances of a dearth of water, food, pen and paper, and I must add, I wasn't even complaining.

It was hard to find people to talk to, and I'd be in constant search of people who suffered from the same dilemma. In retrospect , I always managed to find a few , to have a chat , while I nose dived into my food, a little " over-the-supper" talk , you may call it.

There used to be this one commotion regarding the hostel. Hostel was considered " the " place to enjoy life. Blinded by its word of mouth publicity , I managed to check out the hostel myself . I was left flabbergasted at the audacity of such a claim. Broken windows, broken lavatories , the constant threat of being torn away by some senior or adversary,  I mean , if that was " the " life , I was very satisfied with my " a " life. Apart from a personal tragedy, the first semester was a rather benign period, but it gave me a lot to think about.
 

The women are going dutch these days !

As and when I endeavor to write the post, I have this intuitive tingling sensation ringing inside, telling me that post this post, either I'll be given a rudimentary remark or have a bit of an explanation to do, not that it deters my resolve to introspect this newly found notion in women , the notion of " going dutch". I thought , may be the very mention of my apprehension , could place my intent in good light and obscure me from the post-the-post denunciation.

Unaware of its intended meaning, I was stupefied, mortified and petrified at such an unexpected inclination to the Netherlands. With immediate action, I started emptying the pennies in my pockets , to take critical notice of the financial situation. However, less did my pennies know, that the dutch had intended not to spend, but to save them. A little embarrassed as I was , caught unaware of its more common ( thought highly un-obvious) meaning , I put my pennies back in my little pockets and made a mental note , to make it noticeable on the blog and here I am blowing the trumpet.

While the day started with a sexist article, it's culminating in a sexist post. And for many , particularly women, sexism means "chauvinism" , when put bluntly.

As they say it , times change with changing people. When the women are going dutch , I think men will be more than pleased to let them go. There's obviously no male ego kill here , I mean , with utmost honesty , there's no skin off our nose. But then, of course, women have to make it apparent , it's a convention.

It happens all the time at home , when women ( actually one woman ) in my house undertake a strict resolve to handle all financial exchanges taking place. The men in our house , may outnumber but can never , in all plausible probability , out power the females. In effect and accordance to the feminine resolve to handle finances, all cheque-books, account details are given to them, only to be taken back a week before the end of the month , when the official surrender happens.

A part of the female's male counterpart ( that's my dad) , feels victorious to be in reign again , the other part gives him sleepless nights , for the monkey mess has already been made. We ( my brother and I ) the two sullen souls , sit silently as spectators only to spy on this spectacular spectacle , sporadically sprinkled with such singular speculation. And I must say , that we are formidably entertained.

Like the perfect icing on this cake, I can only recall a message I received from a frustrated guy regarding his dubiety over the fact that, why Mis(s)calculation, Mis(s)interpretation ,Mis(s)timing , Mis(s)anthropy and Mis(s)assumption have always been unmarried females. Though I'm yet to get the logic myself, I don't think it has ever been (Miss)ed nor Mis(s)used. See , at the end of the day, I'm just another Mis(s)ter, how would I know? it's a miss thing.

Lying Gracefully

Strictly in the top three of my mandate for the year 2010 , is "to perfect the art of lying", something that was always on the agenda but never really exercised, for the dearth of exogenous opportunities to lie indiscriminately.

The infatuation to lie started when I was , if I remember correctly, somewhere between the tender age of six and eight, when I saw mummy telling somebody on the phone , that she wasn't at home and was not to be available for the ten days hence. Fed decently with the " jhooth bolna galat baat hai " dose , I could never imagine her lying , and I had all these theories bubbling in my head , " What if she's not really herself ? ".  I know it's hard to imagine how a boy that young can zero in on such a twisted logic, but I guess the idiot box had a subconscious part to play in that.

While a part of me was irked by her ideological hippocracy, the other part was already getting prepared to confront her sacrilegious lie. But alas, before I could exploit this opportunity, I was carefully shown the door and was told to mind my own business. A little appreciative as I was of her ability to lie with such a straight face , with not a single wrinkle on the forehead, it vetted in me this fervent desire to convolute this art , the art of lying  ,irrevocably in my personality. And mind you , this is not a genetic trait, the other members of my family are rather decent and grant me innumerable opportunities to lie , without the slightest inhibition of the fear of being caught.

So , that was that, and I have been in practice mode ever since. Actually , I think , right now, I'm in the middle of this wilderness , where I just might reveal more than what can be consensually considered comely. More appropriately, I'd take a tea break , and return with a rather " sane" state of mind.        

Continued..

It's not as if I have never been lied to or if I'm the most virtuoso of liars myself, on the contrary , my pretentious and far from truth prevarications tend to blurt out their mischief almost peremptorily.

However, as a general phenomenon,  a lie , shadowed well enough in the canopy of pleasing words , has always caught a fraction of my admiration. It'll be hard on my ego to accept , but some of the people I've come to admire the most , are the ones who have managed to make me count my chickens, almost consistently.

I know , after writing all this , my moral integrity would already be in question, but one has to accept , be it reluctantly , that lying sometimes , is a much simpler proposition. A lie for the benefit of mankind , is technically, no lie at all, and therefore all the more unworthy of mention and bereft of excitement. It's the other variety that intrigues me , the much more abominable category of lie. 

So , I was soliloquizing , about what makes a conscious lie all the more potent and hard hitting. Is it just a poker face or a corrupt self conscience? The more sleepy me forces me to conclude that it's both.

On a personal note, if I believe in the institution of lying? I would say : No, I don't. But , come to think of it, if at all I were a "lie evangelist" myself, I wouldn't be telling the truth, would I ?  ;-)

Pregnant with Possibilities

Call it my incredulous imagination , but I couldn't think of a better title. As much as I would like to elaborate on my current trepidations , I'll prefer to keep this outburst lucid and terse.

Even today when I get a call from a curious relative , asking me if engineering is satisfying enough, I pretend that it is. On a rather straight note, why shouldn't it be? It gives me this authority of being called an "engineer", something I'd been craving for all my life.

However, to realise at this point of time , the time when I seem to be a month away from placements , the time I had once fantasized , that I'll have to start over with life all over again in search of another profession is not only grossly ironic but also frustrating.

It's getting a bit too filmy ,and hitherto I have noticed , eventually it always does. Be it Tragically dramatic or Dramatically tragic , it has come to work both ways.

While the not-so-immediate family members keep vigil for an unlimited supply of laddoos , when the news of me getting a job , irrespective of the package and profile , breaks out, my parents feel rather comfortable at delaying such a wasteful expenditure, for I had made my intentions of not taking up a job immediately after engineering transparent and uncompromisable a significant  while back. But then , it exposes me , more inadvertently, to a new variety of inquisitiveness, which tips off with this basic little question : Now What?

Sometimes I think I should be purposefully ambivalent about ambitions. It's safer to do so. Not that I intend to keep my parents curious, but least of all things, it rids me off the burden of giving them a fake hope.

Over an ingenuous cup of tea

There are times , when you write just to know if you can , then there are times, when you write because you're expected to . Finally, there are times when you write , not really knowing why. If I say I'm writing this just for the sake of it , in lieu of passing time ,while my usual ten 'o' clock tea gives off some off its heat to the environment , and makes itself a little more bearable for my tongue, then I'm saying , what is commonly referred to as the "truth". In short, this is going to be random gibberish , which I can assume , any sane soul would/should not only ignore but also ridicule.

I've already talked about the nose here , the nose part-I , if you might recall. Why the Nose Part-II never came by ? Well, I really don't want to tell this , but I guess I need to loyal to my audience :-P. Now , I'm already anticipating the usual " What does he think of himself ?".  I know the word "audience" irks you, doesn't it ? You'd be wondering at my audacity at an assumption of such humongous self vanity. Nowadays, I just can't help my humour going all cold , I think I've been sitting in the AC for too long . Bad one ! Agreed.

Coming back to the reason. Coincidentally , the very day I announced the nose to be an inevitable part of one's personality, I was gunned with a rather rude remark about my own nose , which I should confess, at the least forced me to check its validity in the mirror. With a sensation of sporadic disappointment, I consoled myself , sulked officially for two minutes and thirty seven seconds,  finally stood back in my chair , and wondered at the inevitability of other physical features detrimental in determining one's personality. Eventually, I zeroed upon the tongue.

Why the tongue? Because it expels me to my blissful yesteryears and brings to my memory a certain incidence. I must have been eight , when I was forcefully admitted to the "British School of Table Manners" . The name of the school was rather ironic. The very first day , I went to the school with an expectation of finding teachers only of English origin , and with this malicious desire of making fun of their hindi, if at all they tried their hand at it in front me. Disappointingly , I couldn't find a single Brit , hence the irony. I never really got what they were trying to convey , because then , I stood perpetually confused between right and left. So, no matter how much they tried, they could never convey their point across.   

to be cont..

It's simply different !

First of all things, I should confess to have been thinking of writing about this for over a year  , and now , on a Sunday , when I finally determine myself to push the envelope , I already feel a bit conscious of making public a few thoughts , which I thought were better to be kept clandestine not only from fellow humans , but also to an extent from my own conceivable self. 

As far as my memory buttresses my claim, the word "cliche" entered my vocabulary sometime in the first year of college. Earlier I thought of it as a subsidiary of the word "Touche". It's almost embarrassing to recall instances and conversation where I'd use cliche and touche almost irreplaceably. If only one can exert oneself to imagine , that one may understand how undermining  it would be to proclaim an act , though unintentionally, to be a "cliche" instead of a rightly deserved "touche". But as I am proud to acknowledge , this as a literary faux-pas is not even close to the worse I've been through in misinterpreting english language. My repertoire of misinterpretations has been so enormous that an occasional flip here and there , has been rather run of the mill. Not that anybody so far , has had either the energy or the will to denounce me for such hideous misuse of literal authority.

One may wonder why I seem to be so wordy sometimes , so complex, as it commonly conjectured . When I come to precipitate to an answer to that , I'm caught a bit coughed up. Not entirely because , I've always ostensibly maintained that I'm that "simple middle class guy" .To be honest, sometimes,  I think I'm not, I mean the contradiction is only with the "simple" part, as far as middle class goes, if you'd ever have the pleasure of skimming through my ATM accounts, you'd prefer placing me in a category much below  . But nevertheless, it's an extremely fashionable thing to say about yourself, isn't it ? Most diplomatically correct , as one may say.

It's this simple question I ask myself : Do I really want to be that simple a person ? The question rolls inside my intrepid brain like the little dice rolled over a board game , it rolls and rolls and finally unfolds a mystery of sorts. Well, the answer is: Not Really ! .

What "simple" has come to be interpreted today , goes hand in hand with a boring , cliched existence. The fact that a simple person is transparent, easy to influence and globally manipulatable, an image that ,in the minds of some ,may coincide with that of a glum sycophant. That's not what any guy would have in mind of becoming .

Yet, come to think of it, a complex guy who pretends to be simple has this divine authority to watch the worldly parody around him where people are more likely to assume that he's simple and confined within all the diminutive qualities of a simple person, that I've described above,  is actually,  in a much better position to manipulate things , for the world for him is transparent , people are puppets and their reactions cliche .It's just too simple . No pun intended.

If I'd prefer myself to be called simple? Well, I would rather leave that for myself to answer but not before another year.  

Just Another Something in Shimla

Perhaps, this is an anecdote I cannot but help blurting out. It has this intuitive charm to it , the kind that puts a sub conscious smile on my face every time I tend to recall it.

So, alongside the usual stroll that I had already started getting used to, here on mall road in Shimla, I thought of messaging my newly found female accomplice , just to know her whereabouts. A little apprehensive as I was, I decided to establish myself on a clean green bench on the side of the road, and think of something rather intriguing to write about.

As my mind dwindled between the usual Hi , Hey, Hello, Wassup to choose from , for the perfect start , a little something dawned on me , and eventually, I zeroed upon a cheeky but unconventional ''Oye girlfriend '' to start off, reminiscent of a little joke I shared with her a day before.

It was hardly perturbing , when a little boy, adorning that innocent glee and hair,well oiled and neatly combed, disrupted me for a second and asked me to shift a bit. As courteously as I could , I reduced myself to the paltry one fifth part of the bench , while the boy and his obnoxiously fat mother occupied the rest four-fifth. As the boy sat next to me , sipping his fountain coke with a spluttering sound, I , more by facial conjectures, expressed my dissatisfaction at such a distraction , but it didn't really restrain him from making that sound, perhaps he enjoyed the sound much more than the coke . I can say that because he kept making that sound even after the last drop of coke in his wrinkled plastic glass was exhausted.

As I strived to put in a few words, the little menace kept peeping into my phone screen . May be he's just curious about the apparatus, I assured myself and I let him be. Now, comes the funny part.

Having peeped into my message for a while , he shrugged a shoulder and whispered to his mother : '' Mummy ! Dekho yeh bhaiya hai naa, yeh apni girlfriend ko sms kar rhe hain. '' It was intended to be a whisper, but a good five people around us, including me, could hear it.

With immediate horror on her face, his mother realised the faux pas that her son had put us both in. Half embarrassed and almost apologetically she said to me:'' Bada naughty bachha hai yeh ! ''.

Unaware of social customs , the boy ventured once again to defend his statement , but before he could , his mother volunteered to literally shut his mouth up. As she raised a hand to do so , I replied : It's okay aunty, he's right, girlfriend ko hi sms kar rha hoon. ''

So, as and when I completed writing and sending the message, I moved ahead with my stroll on mall road, with that maniacal smile on my face , wondering how exciting it would be to put this incidence into words.

Whack-a-mole ! (Part II)

So, here I am , caught between crying babies in the Shatabdi , only to be compelled to further elaborate what I started last night.

After that entrenched feeling of being perpetually ignored, I zeroed upon returning back to my nest. Just to explain the metaphorization , the nest refers to my room back home, for it is commonly conjectured that I am seen outside it , only in the rarest of circumstances. In fact it's like our family joke ( the rule of the four Fs ) that only flood , fire , fury and food can force me outside my room.

But I guess I am always surrounded by ironies . As I checked my inbox once again , more with the intention of clearing off unwanted messages,than to find what I had been expecting, I finally got a reply. This is where it became a tad ironic. It's like the little games that life plays. While it may seem from an external perception to be something very regular, it is in fact something resembling to a volatile ECG graph of hope and despair , where hope is like a subconscious throttle to one's system and despair is like a sinking Titanic, immaculately dull and depressing.

Whack-a-mole ! ( Part -I )

When I woke up this morning , I never really realized that I'd mark this particular day under the category of " Historical Days of my Life". It's something that dawned on me when the day culminated with such an exhilarating sequence of events.

So, it was that random morning , like any other , that started off with my reluctance to get up. It's hard to recollect if it was a random thought in my head , or a slight whisper of my own alter ego, that propelled me to pick up that phone and take that first step. On one hand , I thanked airtel for providing me the benefit of messaging , on the other , I personally blamed Mr.Sunil Bharti Mittal , to not have sent me a delivery confirmation, which sort of threw open a certain leeway of ambiguity.

Unable to rest my own curiosity, I ventured out of the house like a hound without an owner. The uncertainty of it all had only began to thicken. The one part of my ingenuous ego, the subtle part, so to say , kept encouraging me to check my inbox , almost momentarily, and the other part , for that matter, mocked me for my own mindless spontaneity, something I'd been really proud of so far.

While I kept cursing all those useless messages that aroused a ray of hope , and that includes CL, Time , Test Funda , JP Infratech, ICICI bank , Airtel , to name a few , a kind of dullness had started to settle in.  I mean , the dullness could have been due to the weather , a heavy sand storm was already on the prowl and a dusty shower was only expected to follow. For the pessimist I am , I thought it was over. Earlier , I had kept my hopes alive convincing myself , that perhaps she hadn't woken up, but as the hour hand struck three in my watch , reality struck me a harder. I had already started planning to spend the rest of the day, in the canopy of a novel named " The Age of Innocence" by Edith Wharton. ( At that particular moment ,  I thought , to read such a title, would only be situationally appropriate)

to be cont....

The Eureka Song

So, it's that lazy Sunday morning when some part of you always compels you to hit the bed , no matter what time it is. I see mom and dad wondering at the audacity of their son to sleep so much on a bright sunny morning. They exclaim with a sigh of relief : " Accha hua medical mein nahi gaye. With this level of carelessness you couldn't have managed to clear the first prof." Instantly , I reply with an innocent glee on my face: " Achha hua aap engineer nahi bane.You guys just aren't cool enough ."

That sparks off my mom like a match stick would spark kitchen stove. I mean her agony is ignited for sure , but it's well within manageable limits  . So, after a brief spell of her " I-must-have-committed-some-serious-fallacy-in-my-previous-birth-to-have-such-an-ignorant-son " remarks, I'm forced to get up. Her pejorative persuasion is like a dialect of her own. In so far , I've learned to bear it in the best of spirits , with a silly smirk on my face and sometimes , with fingers plugged air tight in my ears.

Half unaware of all the activity around me , I somehow , manage to reach for my slippers , and all this while I'm still rubbing my eyes to get a hang of the bright sunlight. In this state of sullen irritation , suddenly, a guitar chord strikes my audible sense, the kind that makes your ears stand up in apprehension.

The sound is so soft , that I'm almost expelled to introspect whether at all it's an exogenous prick or a supernatural string grizzling inside me. I wait for a while . The confusion had not even ended , when the melody changed its course , it moved to a higher note.

The sounds overlapped in emphatic fashion. The merger seemed as transparent as a sugar solution : one could look through the texture and say there's something in it , but that something is literally indecipherable, and so were the overlapping chords.

As I was through with the first part of the melody , the aroma of the song , only seemed to have started spreading more obtrusively with the second. The lyrics started pouring in like a lava of hot chocolate on chilled vanilla ice-cream ; so hot yet so tempting.

Almost statuesque , with an expression of somebody caught in a cyclone, I listened to the song with closed eyes. All this while my mother kept staring at my stance , assuming it to be some sort of yoga .

Sometimes , I wonder , how a mix of bullish frequencies can be potent enough to give you a thrust beyond recognition. A song that gives you that adrenaline rush , a rush so stingy , that it makes the boldest of beauties feel ashamed of their own incapacitativeness (and I know this is really not a word) to induce such a sting in men. The kind of song, to which when I listen , I adorn , more unconsciously, that strictly native haryaanvi accent ( the one that I strive to hide so much), and tell every controversy on its face : " Aan De , aaj to baawda ho rakha hoon ! " ( it means " Let it come, I'm insane today." ) 

Overtime, I've come to call this class of songs : The Eureka Songs.

On the jukebox : Tum Bhi Chalo, Hum Bhi Chalein (Zameer) by Kishore Kumar.

Disaster Management

Precisely now , I sit on my studying table with a certain malicious curiosity to know what catastrophes I am to face in the inevitable dilemma that I will be compelled to endure at 2 pm tomorrow. Verily, that was a very verbose first sentence.

It hasn't been the most cinderella of stories( this may be grammatically wrong) in the previous exams but this one , I tell you , is a different story all together. I mean ,I feel like I am standing on the edge of a cliff , from which I'm expected to jump at 2 pm tomorrow. With a cup of tea in my hand to share my grief, I ogle at the shaft of notes kept on the side of my study table. The books , however, are kept , quite strategically, at an arm's length, but the fact that I'm able to give them a glimpse after every key I hit on the laptop , is somewhat guilt inducing.

So , the word of the day is disaster.

I was reading this article yesterday , about an activity in which people would write a full fledged essay about a single word. Words as random as "random" itself. I thought may be I could put in a few words about " Disaster" , its management although has never been my cup of tea ( with no offense to the cup of tea that I hold in my hand).

Disaster , I suppose , happens every now and then . Be it the sole hundred rupee note feeling lonely in your wallet ( a day after you receive your pocket money) , or the rude look you got when you exclaimed an enthusiastic "Hi"  to a girl who you barely knew. It's all a bit disastrous isn't it ? Especially the latter scenario. ;)

With butterflies in my head , and mice in my stomach , I think about the other disasters that have happened in the past few years. It's only in retrospection , that I am able to laugh at them and I seriously hope that I'm able to laugh about this particular day , when I get to read this post a few years hence. May be then I'll be telling myself : Automata was really interesting , but I never really got it , did I?

So, it could be that random party that I might be attending in the future when one of dad's colleagues came up to me and asked what I did . That's cliche . I would tell him with that pretentious pride on my face : "I'm a software engineer, sir" . Almost suddenly a hidden conscience will be resurrected inside me that would remind me : Mr. Software Engineer , remember automata ? rendering my face expressionless. Then I could only think : That automata exam , what a disaster ! 

Imagining Infinity - Part I

Neither am I a geek , nor have I ever intended to read an alphabet more than what is required of me to clear an examination, but somehow a few things in the world have always struck a chord with my thinking , for the illusion they create in my mind is more than what I could ever expect myself to handle.  Infinity , for me, has been one such 'intangible' notion. Please take note of the adjective "intangible" , I would like to use it in this post with such exploitation that the word itself hoped that it rather meant something else. 


The first time I was taught infinity I was in fourth grade , where it was introduced more as a stereotypical answer to "anything divided by zero ". I used to wonder sometimes what it meant, I could see my teacher stammering when she was asked to elaborate about its relevance(not by me), her face foretold that she was herself elusive , or should I say illusive of its understanding. The best she could do was to draw its symbol on the black board and assume that we were satisfied. Back then I couldn't care less.

Something I did not know myself was that it had left in me that seed of curiosity , a sub conscious one , because of which it was more inevitable that I went ahead and asked random people what it meant. I pretended to be satisfied with whatever answer I received, but deep down I knew I wasn't . I continued to ask people whatever they knew of it. Sadly, all of them seemed to know just this one thing very consistently about it: anything divided by zero is infinity. I thought to myself : Has anybody ever volunteered to break that sentence and comprehend it like a phenomenon. I mean what does anything divided by zero mean anyway?  I'm sure people would like to use their baggage of knowledge, a department where I seem to lack quite immensely, and tell me " Simple hai , limit laga de , lim a->0 (b/a) " and when I would ask them what they meant ,literally, when they said limit tends to zero, they'd hug silence like they'd hug their soul mate. 


Infinity was more than what it was thought to be. It was deceptive when it looked simple and exaggerated when it looked complex. It was a word created by man , and it was powerful enough to engulf the man himself. When man invented computer , he knew the computer could do only what it was told to do, it was a human slave . Infinity, on the contrary , had the power to enslave humans, its very creators. Mathematicians would literally bow down in front of a mathematical problem , if its solution tended to infinity. It had begun to be termed quite infamously :The Mathematical Devil , the Satan of Uncertainty. It was perhaps then that it was ascertained that contrary to general perception, it wasn't just an uncountable commodity , in fact it wasn't even a commodity. It was a notion , an intangible one . It could be thought but not touched, it could be felt but not calculated. It was an emotion , the depth of which was unfathomable.

Life at 3 a.m.

Before I go ahead with this outburst , I should confess to have been compelled by the pristine voices in my head that dare me to get them out. But again I write more because I want to throw it all out and get to back to the Class Diagram , which , under the circumstances, seems like a mistress in the waiting to the more imaginative of my senses. Somehow , I've always felt that 3 a.m. is the perfect time to vindicate.

So here I am , almost wobbled by two days of intense sleeping , and at the edge of an influential, if not critical practical exam. It's hard to get what made me get up in the middle of the night , for I had almost pushed myself at the receiving end of this mishap , not that I am saved from it now that I have actually woken up to do some work but nevertheless, the fact I'm able to give up a few words seems more or less to be the silver lining in the dense cloud of nothingness.

There is definitely something satanic about this night , yes , for sure it is.  It has never looked more silent to me than it looks now. In fact it spooks me a bit , and right now , I am almost half-willing to wake up dad and tell him that " I think there's something under my bed " . Well, as an event, it's nothing new . Ever since I was allotted an independent bed to sleep , I've made my apprehension felt at the slightest of noises in my room , be it a rat on a conquest or a mosquito on its way to a bloodbath, jumping out of the bed and calling dad at the least audible of unanticipated frequencies has been, for me, the standard protocol . Now, how I survived my hostel room for two years is again a mystery every soul in my house has had a hand at in figuring out, but obviously to no conclusions.

Through out my existence , I've always let ghosts have the better of my imagination. Not to mention here , that I have always, though cautiously, intended to befriend one or two. I'll blame the ever iconic horror show "aahat" for such frivolous tendencies. I remember having always watched it with a pillow in my hands. At the slightest intuition of horror , I would cover my face with the pillow , relishing the freaky sounds like a blind man would relish a strip show. I followed it for almost 6 years , after which the episodes starting repeating , and my interest thereon stooped.

The post would be incomplete unless I give my " baba adham ke zamaane ka radio" a worthwhile mention. I cannot but express how attached I am to this coveted radio box. Of all things that I have so far inherited or plan to inherit in the future from my parents, the radio would be the most prized of possessions. In the most distressing of circumstances the crooning of the radio would keep me moderately upbeat , proving to be more an emotional support system than an abstracting distraction. In fact now that I have had this sudden epiphany realizing how precious it is to me , I think it'll be sacrilege to not have given it an independent post on my blog, so I'd rather not reveal anything further. 

I started the post saying " Life at 3 am " , now that I end it at 3: 34 am , I'm quite inclined to say " Sometimes , life starts at 3 am".

Ab se Seedhi Baat , No bakwaas !

So, a couple of minutes back I was told ,quite bluntly, by a valuable critic ( this is the most serene description anybody could ever give him) that the " quality" of my last few posts should have embarrassed me to the extent that I should bury my head in the sand and never take it out, to the extent that I lock myself up ( and down) in a bathroom without taps and keep crying till eternity , to the extent that I should run around in "pink chaddies" telling random people that the "pink chaddies" signify that I'm in the "pink of mental health", to the extent that I forbade my entire progeny to blog on blogspot, to the extent that I told every other girl I met that I was a pervert , to the extent that I wrapped my fingers with cellophane tape should they ever treble to type,  to the extent that I just stopped caring what he said .

Unquestionably , I should accept the last two posts were a bit , okay not-a-bit but completely non-sensical , and the third last one ( Greek Weddings ) was an unintentionally ( okay , you may cut the "un") ostensible effort to pretend knowledgeable, knowing fully well that I wasn't. The next time I'll try to put in more " come-on sense ".

Progressive Lol-ism

Contradictory to the general preconceived notion that you might or might not have assimilated having had a slight glimpse of the heading, the article isn't meant to tickle the proverbial funny bone, so you may proceed if you should without the slightest anticipation of entertainment.

Given the current state of affairs , I feel that if "lol" hadn't been invented ,it would have been inevitably harder to pretend being modest, much less , sane, on google chats. I mean ,when somebody tells you a joke , you have to laugh more because you're expected to and less because you want to. There is absolutely no other option than to be compelled to put in those three letters , and get exonerated of the slightest risk of being termed a " bore" or more dangerously , of being type cast as somebody who lacks the intelligence of getting a joke. Now again , it's immaterial whether one actually meant it , and again, to what extent it was pretentious and obligatory is an elusive mystery in itself. However, if at all, the idea is to deprecate your opponent , not appreciating the joke considered to be, precisely, "the" strategy, the archaic path. But then, if you really want to deprecate him and put him in further diminutive light, wouldn't you want him to live in that illusive world , where all that kicks his adrenaline is the fact that he has in his pocket a "potentially funny" joke. This way , he would be more than encouraged , to share his thoughts with the junta ,and the further audacious he gets in spreading the profligacy of his joke, the bigger fool he makes of himself.


I was just wondering , that if at all the root of this "lolistic" invention was to be traced, what it would be like. But, there's no absolute point tracing it and hence I wouldn't. Obviously , there is no dearth of good jokes, jokes that command that awe and appreciation on their very mention. In that case however , not only the word "lol" truly means itself but is generally coupled with a sumptuous addition of " hahahahas". And it is precisely then that one realizes that it wasn't that bad a mention.( :D ).Just a pinch of digression. I remember being taught a cognitive strategy in my earlier years , for I had always had this inherent confusion between left and right. Despite frequent mug ups, they were just too hard to decipher for me. In fact, I had this notional faith that the Right Path( from this right I mean ,correct) Path is always the Right Path( from this right I mean the direction) and this was ,I should say tersely, the cornerstone of my decision making in directions. Now , the fact that my name means " The Master of the right path " , shines out to be one of the bigger ,much less ,brighter ironies to have struck me. So the idea was to associate a picture to the words -right and left, and then overtime I was neatly sorted. Since then I've , more subconsciously, had this habit of associating pictures to commonly used words. Ever since 'lol' became a part of general vocabulary , both oral and written, I was more than compelled to attach an expression to it. So here it was, as and when people on chats typed "lol", I could automatically start visualizing them laughing their brains out sitting across their respective computer screens and I should add here , sometimes the very thought of some people laughing so blatantly used to make me smirk myself.

Now, the visualization of "hahas" is a little more complicated, for it can be perceived differently with different expressions attached to it. The idea is basically , how you say it? It could that sullen " ha--haha--hahaha " where the intention , more generally, is not to appreciate but to depreciate. An almost equally glum pattern is " ha ha ha ha". To be able to imagine a laugh with an avalanche of hahas is a little difficult , but I guess trying to imagine a guffaw would be more accurate. Again , trying to imagine some people guffawing at a joke , is not only entertaining but also enthralling, because some of these people are the ones who have literally hidden themselves in the canopy of subtlety , by the virtue of which the public display of unrestricted laughter is considered "inappropriate". Be it as they like it for themselves , it hardly bothers me. on the contrary , I feel indebted to these people , for if they hadn't been that , what should I say, out of the box , I couldn't have managed to gather my food : the food for thought.

Approximately In-approximate

In a world where some people intend to express their intention accurate to the third decimal, the word " Approximately" turns out to be a potential savior for the other variety. With increasing complexity and burgeoning dependency on the minusculest of exogenous details, Approximation has transformed itself from being a choice to a necessity for carrying out wordly processes . Now, what I intend to say may not be clear from what I have written so far , but whatever you may think it to be is only approximately correct. This is one fine example of using the word "Approximately" to shadow one's own unknowingness, the fact that I am myself incongnisant of what I mean to say here.

Putting it straight. As I was sitting today in one of my theory classes in college, very devotedly observing a lizard which had ventured into the arena ( the classroom I mean). And by the word "lizard" I do not intend to personify the teacher , it's a real lizard that I intend to bring into picture. I could intuitively sense that the lecture that was then in pursuit, was as effectively paralyzing the lizard physically as it was torturing me mentally. As sympathetically as we looked at each other ( the lizard and I) , I had this malignant hope raging inside me , the hope that the lizard would eventually lose its consciousness and drop dead on the criminal , the very lecturer who can and should be inculpated of paralyzing fifty nine other bright bulbs in class, apart from the already semi-functional one like mine. I was still wondering whether such a fiasco would deter him from continuing his lecture.

As much I would like to elaborate on the above, I'd stick to the issue. So, lost as I was in my unintentional telepathic interaction with the lizard, I had this random thought. What are the consequences of cascaded approximations, the very approximations that have been carried upon through generations. Almost suddenly,the alter ego inside me became all the more cacophonous and made me self answer a few questions. What was the inherent purpose of using an approximation? Clarity , I suppose, I said to myself. What else? backfired the devil. Perhaps ,they used it for the ease of it , I answered. Then came the question of preponderance. What if the process of approximation, which is carried out in one process cascaded to the other, eventually gave a result which contradicted its own inherent purpose ? It was this that made me realise how the deceptively trivial " approximation" may sway the results to an extent that they produce conclusions absolutely contradictory to the real result, camouflaging the real bone of contention by a wide margin.

Now, I know people will try to justify this with concepts of Maximum error and stuff , but that's not the issue here you see. Life and history are not aptitude questions that can be solved with a pen and paper, there are just way too many exogenous things that need to be pondered upon before making a final quote for the answer, which is many a times just impossible to do. An analogy here is a must and this one I suppose is the most relevant right now. Gossip, is possibly the most pervasive form of oratory approximations and I'm pretty sure each one of us has witnessed ( and I say this very sympathetically) the capability of an immature gossip ballooning into a false rumour and eventually souring terms between and amongst many.

ULIPS and TULIPS

What has caught my imagination this time is perhaps not the most contentious of issues today, but nevertheless , worth some mention here. The news about the newly found truce between the IRDA and SEBI is already making rounds. This very battle reminds me of the two year old ownership mess between the Ambani brothers. Earlier the structure of this financial hierarchy was somewhat elusive of my understanding , but having given it a random thought , I think I can get to the bottom of it.

SEBI, the sole regulator of all equity transactions in the market, is the more dominant of bodies as compared to the IRDA. Here comes the analogy. SEBI can be projected to be the legitimate son of NSE, the parent regulator. Having a decent , if not complete authority over transactions , SEBI has long been ostensible about its power and influence. IRDA on the other hand, metaphorises itself to be the ignored Illegitimate Son. Now, the argument arises over the word "illegitimate" . By my limited understanding I perceive an object to be illegitimate if its formation precedes the intention of it being used. IRDA was setup with a more obligatory set of powers, powers given to it for mere consolation . The board members of the IRDA had long realised this painful irony, and not only were they complacent to it but also somewhere satisfied with the perks they were granted for doing absolutely nothing .More directly, it turned out to be a dream job for some. For the more intellectual variety at IRDA , this was blasphemy. The ignominy they had to face in front of their counterparts in the SEBI would squeal them for inside , hitting their semipermeable wall of ego with little pebbles. As time passed , the rotundity of these erstwhile minute pebbles kept increasing gradually. What could not be averted was this ego being thwarted one day, making them clamor for their respect. It was coincidence then that a new financial product was about to hit the Indian circuit. The name ,ULIPS, very much synonymous to "tulips" , initially, did not go very well with investors. However given its torrid promotion, it somehow filled hand in glove with the then emerging needs, the need to hedge, that is to add to the portfolio an element of prudence, which was sufficed by that 2-5 % share of insurance. It can be blamed on the financial illiteracy of the then naive Indian investor, who invested his life earnings in this novelty , that the real picture remained rather hidden. As it appears now, people were fooled upfront , how ? that's a different story all together.

How does the IRDA come into picture? The IRDA needs some applaud for capitalizing on that minute 2-5% share of insurance to bring ULIPS within its purview of regulation. SEBI , inebriated by its power , failed to gauge the audacity of the situation, and of the fact that it had lost the opportunity to regulate a product which, by far, needed more regulation than others. And thereby followed the mess we have today. As the matter gets set to be settled in court , the common man is caught unaware of his financial unawareness and projects himself to be a member of a breed of Indians , who have very recently managed to accumulate a decent amount of wealth, the newly rich as they are called, participating in India's growth story but have failed to pocket that financial and intellectual insight that could help them retain this wealth in the future.

Being essentially "santimantelle"

"When he said it , he never meant it.When he truly meant it , he couldn't say it. And finally when he could , it was profoundly irrelevant." This is perhaps the newly evolved characteristic of the modern metrosexual man, the santimantelle man , so to say. Callous , as some of us are, we do pretend to bother about things, things we're expected to be bothered about, but I guess , sooner or later , the inevitable yet camouflaged feeling of indifference shows out.

Have you ever seen a man cry ? I haven't. Having said this I'm quite sure , we all have seen unsuspecting women shedding tears as if they were contracted to fill the proverbial buckets. So, what does this imply, by the general sense of perception? Maybe, men are less exposed to such circumstances. And then I ask myself , are we? or are we not? May be calamity never struck us . Heavens never fell upon us. If at all they did, they were never too heavy. If at all they were hard to bear , not hard enough to make us cry, not in front of women at least.

It may be the inner secret for some, revelations for the others , but men do cry. And when they do , heavens fall apart , the helplessness of the crying man is as unfathomable as the depth of the ocean. One is thrown open to speculating , what in the world could be hard enough , to make a man, who is , quite ironically , the pretentious iconism of strength and apathy, sulk inconsolably. When they taught us " relative value " , never had I imagined I would use this to compare the worth of a man's tears to a woman's. It's commonplace to see women crying, and when you do see one , you think , something might be wrong. Quite on the contrary , you see a man crying , though I'm sure he won't cry publicly , we're not built that way you see , but if at all you do , you tell him , these tears are the investments you've made for your entire life , cry , cry your heart out , the more you cry now , the more apathetic you become , the more unperturbed you are by the world around you, the more satisfied you'd be with what you have , and finally , when you'll become almost indifferent to every wordly or other wordly emotion that tends to circumscribe your atmosphere, they'll start calling you the proverbial " man".

For the blabber mouth I am I have to add that personal comment. Well, I'd say , I'm yet to shed my fair share of tears. I'll rather save them for my post married life. I'm pretty sure, with the unanimously criticized traits I possess , I'm bound to give my wife company , as and when she cries cursing the very day she married me , and then, even though it may seem ironical , I'll cry with her , consoling her , and then perhaps telling her : you couldn't have managed anything better than me you see, we're both equally stuck and then in the midst of all the pandemonium happening , I'd say : khaane mein kya hai? , only to see a set of brows raising in wicked amazement.

The lovable loser vs The losable lover

More of a dilemma than a paradox. Perhaps, this is a choice one has to make inescapably, at least once in life. If ever there was a need to configure the pros and cons fo anything at all, I'm sure this contentious issue could be summoned to be the perfect food for thought. I have fellow beings talking about their ego, publicly that is. I'm just wondering if an egoist could actually be so blatantly blurteous about his/her ego. So, the very claim of being an egoist turns out to be all the more ironical. White Bear Phenomenon ? :P.

Having witnessed a considerable number of specimens of the so-called elite species of women, I'm somewhat intuitive of this dilemma prevailing in them( the losable lover or the lovable loser). Well, it's definitely not something to be critical about. But the whole idea of turning a simple choice into a gut wrenching dilemma is kinda thought provoking, nevertheless extremely entertaining to watch. A trade-off of sorts, the inherent qualities of being a good lover and being a genuine loser, are conflicting, but only peripherally (those who got the joke-> lol). It seems to be some kind of portfolio management. To be precise on the idea, you always intend to keep your options at hand. Now, that I've already framed the analogy, let me intrigue myself deeper and pour your brain into the bowl of abstraction , then, beat it unsympathetically into the proverbial yogurt.( this imagination by the way is indebted to the ever un-understandable idiom - Dimaag ka Dahi !). Investors, in particular, are a breed of gentlemen and not so gentle women, who in their incessant desire to get rich invest their already puffing bank balances into endeavors promulgated by others. The motives are comprehensively simple, to get rich. But somehow, by the virtues of common sense they do realise that the birth of every winner is an inevitable vindication of at least two losers, one being the loser himself and the other who made him realise that he really was one, and therefore winning as a proposition is not always equally likely. The standard panacea is to play low: Risk Averse Strategy. The so-called beta of such an investment is lower, guaranteeing the investor more safety than high returns. Nevertheless,on the flip side( risk lovers), there is always a collegium waiting to break free , longing to invest unscrupulously , carrying beneath their skin the fear of losing it all one day, the dramatically obvious Losable Lovers.

Somehow, I always try to conclude the paragraph with a personal take on the subject, but I guess, this time I just don't fit the context. If at all,though forcibly,I had to attach myself to a respectable category , I'll place myself in the section of losable losers , not that I'm particularly regretful of being one, quite on the contrary, I'm not regretful at all. Sometimes, having getting to see the fate of losable lovers and lovable losers and its effect on their respective counterparts is just too much fun. ;)

Vicks: Exploiting Sensitivity

I'm almost sure that some of you might have heard the word " triaminic" earlier and only if you'd have the audacity to recollect, it is somewhat etched in the faintest of your childhood memories. Triaminic is an analgesic( decongestant) meant to relieve children of common cold and cough. I'm assuming, you're already getting bored, well , so am I , and that is exactly why I'm writing this post.

The advertising industry, in general, has always been ruthless enough to capitalize on the most dormant of human emotions and resurrect corporate benefit. The strategies promulgated are somewhat symbolic of human nature yet, hollow to the core in their meaning. Let me begin with a native example. I'm sure you're pretty aware of the architypical Vicks ad, the one which portrays a lady ( who looks rather too young to play a mother) who tries to comfort her son ( who looks old enough to apply Vicks all by himself) by rubbing his stand-out red coloured nose with Vicks and within the span of that 15 second advertisement, not only the boy's cured off his nosily notions, but there's a conspicuous depiction of motherly love showered all over him, as if the so called motherly love is resurrected only in catastrophic times of nose blockages.And what follows is some idiotically silly tagline, the so called icing on the cake. You may wonder why I seem to have a grudge at this.Perhaps , you'll get a hunch in what follows. Upfront, as and when I saw this advertisement for the very first time, it placed in my thinking an inconceivable correlation between mothers and analgesics, which technically is non-existent. So much was the profundity of this advertisement, that , I, then a boy aged 8 years, had embibed an unshakeable belief that perhaps, the effect of analgesics and the so called motherly affection , were variables that always went hand-in-hand, not to forget here the non-sensical belief, that analgesics may prove effective if-and-only-if they're applied by moms. These very notions were thwarted one night, when my white blood cells almost gave up, and I had to succumb ,quite inevitably, to the most irritating diseases of all in-humanity: Common Cold. Coincidently, mother wasn't at home that night.With mummy having night duties, twice a week, dad had to be my only company. I remember myself being the sole victim of his cooking dexterity which somehow always ended up in unpalatable disasters, and then, by the virtues of a unanimous consensus on the ramifications of gulping those unpalatable disasters , we ended up dining at the nearby restaurant. That night, dad being the only help at home , had to make up for mom.The best he could do then was to threaten me to take the analgesic, while I backfired and threatened him of telling mom, that my common cold, was a possible consequence of his forcing me to try "kulfi" , which according to him is by far the best thing one can buy with money, but of course this was only one side of the "forced Kulfi" story, and I better not reveal the other half. As skeptic I was to let dad do the honour of applying the ever iconic Vicks, I was as much confident of its irrelevance, for the preconceived notion of having mom around in common cold catastrophes had haunted my mind ever since I had watched the advertisement. What happened , wasn't much less than a revelation. I actually felt better and there I stood wondering at the audacity of these capitalist giants to try and fool eight year olds in believing the unbelievable. What more can an eight year old feel other than his own "silly"ness of assuming with folded eyes all that is told to him , while others hear his opinion and laugh at it.

Such is the misery of capitalism, which hasn't obscured from exploiting the power of human emotions, Human Sensitivity , so to say.

The White Bear Phenomenon

It is most ironic that when you try and restrict yourself from thinking about something, you inevitably tend to think about it , majority of the times much more intriguingly . Why does this happen ? Well, it is hard to say. The human mind has had this innate capability to learn via contradiction, which more or less summarises the very tendency if humans of being argumentative. Somewhere beneath these grey cells, lies a perspiring ego , almost impregnably waiting to be challenged more so contradicted. It is perhaps this invisible trap of ego that abstracts the whole thought process in a direction one is trying to obscure from.

To make things a trifle more interesting, lets say you commit yourself that from now on , you will never even embrace the thought of the girl towards whom you have a predilection. The level of certainty is such that you try to obscure from even the thought of her and then you tell yourself that this would be it, I would erase her like she was a memory etched with a pencil in my mind. Less has one realised, that it would be then that the very thought of her would become so prominent , that what seemed earlier to be an ingenuous predilection turns out to be an unanticipated affinity, an inclination so staunch that you tend reminisce her fragrance more conceivably than your own odour . The very thought of her, that you intended to consider animosity eventually becomes a indetachable part of your thinking. To sum it all up,as much as you would try to not to think of her, you will keep moving deeper into an endless dark pit, one which has nothing but her memories, leaving you in nothing but a helpless delusion. It is then that one truly gets the taste of what is so pervasively called The White Bear Phenomenon. Personally , the white bear hasn't struck me as yet. Being lazy helps here :P

Try this and be honest : Don't think about the boy who wrote this article for 10 seconds, just don't even let his picture enter your mind. The idea is to contain yourself in such a way that the boy who wrote this article doesn't appear even in the realms of your thinking. Whatever he may be, you will not let him dominate your cerebrum for the minusculest of moments. Basically, you don't have to think about Nitin Garg , 732/IT/07 for 10 full seconds, as easy as that.


And the time starts now : 1 , 2 , 3, 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 ,9 , 10 .

Gotcha!

Fantasasia !

Has it ever happened to you that you're in the middle of a utopian dream , and then you literally talk yourself out of it , for the perfection of it all tends to disturb you more than it could have sufficed you. "It was too good to be true", you say to yourself.

I had one such experience where I almost compelled myself ( in the dream ) to believe that it was surely a dream, my life just couldn't be that benign, till I woke up and realised that it really was a dream. The previous state , termed Fantasasia by my limited perceptions, can be defined as a state of "all that I wanted to but could never be", the supremely coveted state that is. And yeah , there are dreams where you get to date the likes of Rachel Weisz , Jennifer Lopez, Anne Hathway .... I generally obscure from talking myself out of these dreams at least, and then there are dreams in which by the time you get to do something substantially pernicious , you're disgracefully woken up with a tap on the head. Nevertheless, the best one could do then , is to buy a few more minutes of sleep and hope against hope that you'll be reinstated in those tempting opportunistic circumstances as if the dream were a movie rolling in your head. However,there is yet another category of dreams, of which you could remember nothing by the time you wake up and then you try and try harder to recollect but you just can't. Nightmares, for that matter are easier to cope, for you're inevitably forced to believe that it couldn't get worse and then you think that may be I was better off earlier(the circumstances before the nightmare), even though I wasn't that happy, but it sort of did it for me, I mean it would have at least been better than the nightmare and then the nightmare has a nightmarish ending , and you're brought back to your senses .
In retrospection, I recall falling from Kutub Minar in one of my dreams . The experience I must say was enthrilling, I'll tell you why. In those 20 seconds of free fall, you get to get a glimpse of all that you had done in life , good ,may be bad like a fast forward of sorts and then just when you're about to fall flat , you feel as if something has entered you. It is precisely simultaneous. You touch the ground with a "thump" and you feel as if your soul is back inside you, and then in the suddenness of it all you wake up and tell yourself , " Phew ! that was some dream ! ". If at all I had to give an analogy, it would like experiencing a 20,000 watt electric shock for the minutest of moments, giving you something more than just a tickle and far less than a real free fall.

For my uncalled for critics , who've had the nerve to denounce me a Universal Pessimist, there's (quite unanticipatedly) a much more benign ending to this post. I may be wrong , even though I hope not, but I'm sure there always comes a day when you think you're in a utopianly perfect dream and by the virtues of innate pessimism , you keep convincing yourself that this is just too good to be true, and wait for somebody to wake you up until you realise that there IS no waking up , it's real and happening , not a dream anymore and then you finally get to say the proverbial Indian epithet of satisfaction : Abe Jhakaass!

The Nose (part-I)

Well its not a very cliche choice for a title. But I guess a tormenting cold has forced me to introspect and take this part of my body much more seriously. There will always be men who'll hail their respective libidos to be the best part of their body, just to remind them, you aren't the best judge of that you see, it's not an organ meant to suffice you, so you'd hardly have a hunch how it stands out! More so, what makes men like these so insecure of their manhood in the first place bowls me over completely . Not to get too vulgar here, after all this is supposed to be a family blog :P

The nose, for that matter, is an organ that interests me , just for the sake of its "symbolism" , not solely in Indian sense but globally. For starters it's meant to signify your Self-Respect , as the famous Indian phrase goes " naak katwa di" . This phenomenon of the nose being cut ( not literally though) has been plagiarized by the scene in Ramayana ,when Surpanakha, Ravana's sister fails at her attempts to seduce Sir Ram and in lieu of her heart wrenching efforts , her " nose" is torn to pieces quite heartlessly by H/O Mrs. Sita. Now that perhaps, was not a battle of seduction that Ram had to face, it was an attack on his Self Respect and he reacted in the way described above. I'm just wondering why the "Nose" ? why not a hand or a leg for that matter, why not a plain little scar on the forehead.

It was in the Oxford Book Store in C.P. once when I heard a pretty lady with eyes glazing with fire say " your right ends where my nose starts" to a young gentlemen giving an impression that if there was anything that he needed most at that instant , then it was a room to lock himself up . At the suddenness of it all , I came to believe that perhaps the fine looking gentlemen had tried to tickle the nose of the young lady for unknown reasons of course, but it was only when I tried to imagine the whole incident that I realised that " the nose " was simply a symbolic personification, in actuality it stood for something else . What it means to reflect, is not particularly clear to me, but it is an inevitable reflection of one's personality.