Mourning the Death of Good Old Anonymity and Portending the Ensuing Tragedy

This blog isn’t as anonymous as I would have liked it to be, and I am already fretting over that fact. Heck, it’s not anonymous at all. Can you call it so, if your uncles and aunts know about its existence (and banteringly refer to its title and suchlike)? Certainly not! And, though it’s highly unlikely, what if they, God forbid, actually read it? Will some justice prevail?

That’s where I stand. Lynch-esque posts will not pop up and flourish in all their glory as often. The well-well-why-not-be-a-“good-boy” philosophy of mine will take the front seat. Contents of this blog will become saccharine; I will hug people online, thank them profusely. I will write favourable reviews of “Thavamai Thavamirunthu” and the like. And what not!

But, all is not lost. With all due humility, a little bit of whatever this blog used to be ^[1], will be retained.

And, as is my wont, I will end this post, by adding my bit to the readers’ woes, make them cry “Why O why? Why at all?” and sneer at this blog, its author and the Creator Himself.

This blog will soon host, God forbid not this time, some fiction – dark, gloomy, morbid, sinister, moody, searing (and life-affirming, if time permits) tales about human existence from time immemorial and other things.

[1] – “And what was that?” I wonder.

Off

Anyone who looks at this blog for the very first time would easily sense its overwhelming insensibility along with an almost surreal revelation that it’s, after all, written by a fellow human being.
But, I don’t claim to be weird. In fact, I am not weird. I think claiming insanity is a bit too pompous. Insane people don’t happen just like that on an ordinary day. Just some irrelevant inconsequential writings do not a lunatic make.

“Why are you boring us to death with all this?” you ask. Well, just when I was about to leave for a 2-weeks long vacation to Chennai, I pompously made a statement that more “inanity is in the offing,” in my previous post. Sheer over-confidence.

Anyway, it’s time to eat some humble pie. I am put to shame. I confess that, I can’t be perennially insensible. And, I am not insane.

No posts (or I might sneak in one or two) for a month or so, much to the relief of young optimistic readers looking forward to a bright colorful future.

Off to a big vacation!

The best smoke of my life

Just an hour ago, I had the best smoke of my life. Actually speaking, it was the first true smoke in which I actually inhaled it and all that jazz. It felt good; in fact, great!

My admiration for smoking as an act of doing something still remains. Just that it went up by a couple of notches after this event.

Note: Insensible posts will follow soon. Not that there has been any break or something. This is just an assurance to the non-existent readers that more inanity is in the offing.

Updated (that it wasn’t all that great after all) on May 18, 2006 at 11:18 a.m. after 4 full days of arbitration.

“Number ‘Theory’”

All numbers are equal, but some numbers are more equal than the others.

Here’s my take if asked (and even if not asked) to enlist such numbers.

0 and ∞ are (not to mention that they are one and the same) zero and infinity, and hence qualify by default.

1 represents unity; that is, the commonness, symmetry et al in the universe. And most importantly, it signifies the symmetry between 0 and ∞. Just for that, it qualifies.

2. Two. To be, or not to be: is that *the* question? Or, is that just a question? Now, that’s something I have been thinking about for a long time. Is ‘2’ special? Is binary natural, by design? Or, is it just an ‘implementation detail?’
The world in binary mode seems too simplistic. But, at the same time, ‘2’ definitely seems much more special than the rest of the numbers.
“Is this problem indecidable by nature?” I keep asking myself, much as I am convinced that, how much ever I try, I will never get the moment of clarity. (Since, there isn’t any!)
The question is whether ‘2’ is special. There are 2 answers that seem equally good.
Oru Korvaiyaa varla?
So, it qualifies in its own way, even as it fails.
Moreover, it represents two sides of the symmetry between 0 and ∞, which however are one and the same.
Haiyyo! Bayangara Korvaiyaa varuthu!

Well, the rest are mere numbers, each of them just as mere as the rest.

SQoSSD #5

There are only two kinds of people in this world: Those who are already dead and those who will be soon.

The Human Tragedy

The human tragedy isn’t much of a tragedy in itself.

Actually speaking, it’s a comedy; dark, black, bitingly sarcastic, slapstick, humane, feel-good or just plain funny. In fact, it’s more comedic than any other single genre of comedy.

As one often realizes, when absolutely delighted and excited after accidentally bumping onto a really good movie, or when immersed in total bliss listening to superb stuff, unconditionally embracing his triviality. Even, when one is excited just after deciding to have a “Rude” under the “Martini Madness” menu in a cool pub, or when pleased at the hot rasam served in a nearby restaurant. Worse even, when one gets ridiculously happy that somebody nodded in agreement on an obscure point that he made.

And so does one, how much ever he tries to dismiss it as a “mere event, part of the great web, that has befallen him,” when clearly stumped by a really cool salary hike after an average ^[1] appraisal.

Life is delightful. More so, if your EQ ranges from 5.7 to 5.9.

[1] - I am really not sure if it was bad or average.

Last modified on Apr 20, 2006 at 1:11 p.m. to infuse some clarity in the post.

Jokes and Beliefs

A joke. That’s what it is. That’s exactly what it is.

My life is a big joke and probably a good one. I often wonder if it was one single joke or an array of jokes.

May be, it is a single joke and the audience (“God” and I, that is) is laughing waveringly at the hilarity of that single joke. At times, laughing hard rolling on the floor, at times slowly recovering from fits of laughter and clutching the handles of the chair to sit back on it, at times smiling gently and reclining comfortably into the chair, and at times bored of the joke and repeatedly repositioning oneself in the chair; all these fleeting moments constituting the fine units of the overall timeline of the joke, that is being cracked.

Or may be, it is indeed an array of jokes and the audience laughs hard or less, smiles, smirks or jeers at one joke at a time.

I believe in jokes. I mean, I actually *believe* in jokes; “believe”, as in my set of belief(s). In fact, that’s the only thing I believe in. May be, this realisation had not dawned upon me, a couple of years ago. But now, it definitely has.

Coffee. Strong caffeine. Now, that’s another thing that I have started to staunchly believe in, of late.

Of or related to problems and solutions

I am trying to get rid off some drafts that I had saved in the past and push them as posts, on general principle. This was drafted originally on 13^th February, 2006 at around 6:48 p.m, and modified now to look palatable.
Further update: Contents last modified on 11^th April at around 1:25 p.m. to suit the author's mood and taste.

Feb 13^th, 2006

Problems, in general, can’t have solutions. If there was one, there wouldn’t have been a problem at first place. {So, problems are nothing but facts; facts that are a little annoying, but facts nevertheless.}

Somebody might come up with examples to refute this claim, like this:
Q: how much is 17 times 18?
A: Hmmm, the conventional wisdom has it as 306.
Well, this kind of example is a special case and rejected outright because of the sheer number of living beings that know the answer.

I know there is an alternate version which goes like this:
Problems are meant to have solutions. If there weren’t any, nobody would have tried to pose it as a problem. {So, problems generally have solutions, and they would have been accepted as facts, otherwise.}

Again, some frustrated reader, might come up with examples to refute this claim, like this:
Q: how do I get a girlfriend?
A: Now, I can’t have an answer for this, when you yourself don’t. Can I?
Well, may be, this is a special case as well and need not be considered in this discussion. {So, we will assume that there is an impending solution in this case, much to the reader’s delight; and that, it will take some finite time to find the solution.}

Now, I pose a problem - to find out which of the above theories are right.
The discerning reader would have realised that theory #1 is deftly done and hardly makes any claim about problems having solutions. Where as, according to theory #2, there will always have to be a solution, now that I have specified a problem.

My dear reader, here the supporters of theory #2 are caught off guard unless they offer a convincing solution to this problem. Else, the winners by default, the supporters of theory #1, will go on to make more claims.
1. Contradiction is the only tautology.
2. Incompleteness is the most complete.
3. Cynicism is beautiful.

Now, this write-up was just restating what every kid knows once it steps into this world and sighs. The indecidability, on whether there is a solution or not, for a problem, is just a “constraint”. And, the solution, or the lack of it, is just an “implementation detail”.

Final note:
There are no problems. There are only facts. On second thoughts, there are no facts either.

A token visit to the local temple (a.k.a.) The silly joys of irreverence

These are some notes that I had written originally on February 27^th of this year, after a pleasant visit to my hometown, and intended to publish it. Not very unreasonably, I never finished it. Now, I am publishing it here, after some bare editing to make it palatable to the reader, in lieu of the general principle that this blog should be the only place where all my written pieces of you-know-what should remain.

Feb 27^th, 2006

I went home this weekend that just went past over us. Among the eventful things that happened were the meetings I had with lot of long-lost reduced-to-hi friends. The one who studied till 5^th standard with me and then diverged his path from the rut and went on to do more manly things, one who quit the school past his 10^th standard and joined a polytechnic course, and so on. It was nostalgic, to say the least.

Not visiting the temple in the past dozen visits back home meant one thing; that I’d have to visit it this time. Also, it happened to be Sivarathiri. Exhibiting absolute pretence, my amma asked me to come to the temple because it was Sivarathiri. The actual reason wasn’t that. It was that my last visit to the temple is already past the expiry date and will no more be valid; even if not with God Himself, at least with amma. So, we walked over to the Ayyappan temple (the Ayyappan temple had a Shiva deity as well) nearby the sea shore.

I, sometimes ^[1], wonder how irreverence comes to me very naturally. For e.g., the first thing that struck my mind when I heard that my Computer Networks professor was *actually* a professor (with a Ph. D and all) is that how dumb the one who gave it to him should have been. The possibility that the dear pitch bald (this is expressed with utmost empathy as there are flourishing signs of the same showing up with yours truly as well) professor was capable of doing something that is confounding to the rest of us never struck me. As a matter of fact, during my final year project work, I myself have confounded him with such unpalatable balderdash (conceptualized during an ‘insightful’ grape juice session) passing it off as new ideas (since he really insisted upon new ideas and publishing them on journals and such stuff) and made him listen to it for some good amount of time.

This time around in the temple Lord Shiva was having his day; or night as a matter of fact. There were a host of aunties and housewives each of them equipped with an unbound book white-covered thin book full of slokas in Tamil/Sanskrit, most of them written in Tamil though. My appa was on the mike reciting Rudhram and Chamakam, the couplet in the Vedas/Upanishads on Lord Shiva. There was one more person, much younger, accompanying my father who just couldn’t recite it as loud as my father did. (Angry with himself and this world, he came out and repeatedly checked if the mike was working right and tried really hard to bring its volume down so that his voice could also be heard.)

Greeting everybody you know on your way with a token “Hi! How are you doing?” is perhaps the most difficult task in this world. Worse it is, when you are from a nutshell of a place where everybody knows everybody else. So, as you smile and try evading one aunty, you would have already missed another one. That’s good, you may think. But, as you round about the temple ^[2], she will catch you again and you’ll have to explain the possibility of you actually missing such a huge figure. And you rue to yourself, what Subhash Nagare says in Sarkar, “Kitni baar samjhaya hai tumhe Zero! paas ke phaide dekhne se pehle, door ke nuksaan ke baar mein sochna chahiye.”

So, it’s better to catch as many of them while they were reciting the slokas so that they pardon you with a portending smile and miss those slokas (which somehow gives you a great pleasure). My sister who was pretending as though she was really interested in the proceedings was only managing to doze away. I had already started thinking about the post that I am making right now and more specifically this line that I am typing now.

[1] - which means that, I really don’t wonder, but claim that I do, so that I could pass something off as a new post.
[2] - this, perhaps, could be the reason why this tradition of going around the deities must have originated; so that one can meet people and talk to each other on the way and spend some quality time.

A Rude Shock

Yesterday, I was in for a rude shock, when I realised that, in one’s mind, melancholy could creep in like that. Just like that, in a moment.

Now, this came in as a rude shock because, after all these years of propounding theories, one after another, I was somehow of the idea that I had learned to perfectly dodge melancholy.

I have had learned to laugh at myself. There was this moment of clarity somewhere in these 20-odd years which made me think so. May be, it was not a single moment, but a vast passage of time that metamorphosed me. (As I have already confessed somewhere in this blog, I feel I have already lived for a very long time; so long that it’s virtually impossible to categorize myself as a young man, though “saner” minds would do so.) So, often I laugh at myself when I spout theories about life; when I fret over a taxing day at the office; when a the CD/DVD cover a favourite movie cracks a bit; when I wonder if I had a disturbed childhood, on an idle day; when I live my life. Thus, the idea that maintaining absolute frivolousness could evade melancholy.

The day in itself (yesterday), if it’s not obvious, was as bland as it could get. I was quite tired of loitering here and there on the web and finally decided to go home. But, I had to book my tickets for the next weekend (which I didn’t get eventually) and have dinner in between. After failing to get the tickets, I hopped over to the legendary Sri Krishna Café for my dinner and met an ex-roommate of mine.

Now this friend of mine often sports a sorry face and gets pissed off with life on a daily basis. But that has never been a matter of concern for others (yours truly included) and only makes him the butt of our jokes often. Yesterday, he had a certain unexplainable pensiveness in his face, or so I felt. That got me thinking. Now, something that makes one think is potentially dangerous; unconditionally so, when you actually connect to somebody like that friend of mine.
All things, that are fodder enough for bringing in a contemplative mood, came into one’s mind in a flash – 5.7 to 5.9 EQ, “After all, one does need to do Something in life”, oblivion, senility, “The universe is expanding” - stuff which my dear friend himself, wouldn’t have thought (as only he can, should, must and need to) of.

I sent out an incomprehensible message (as often I do) to confound some friends, who challenge themselves on not getting confounded on the sort of messages that I send, and reply challenging me back with their musings, wisecracks and self-proclaimed brainchildren. And thus, it was already a joke.

Needless to say, I was amused!

The art of the righteous man...

... is beset on all sides by the geographical inequities of the Creator and the tyranny of evil yesteryear imperialists.

A fellow eastern philosopher

Blessed is he, who in the name of the supreme art and insuperable intellect, shepherds his camera lens through the valley of darkness, for he is truly the art's keeper and the finder of its lost nuances.

My left foot.

And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to belittle and destroy these pieces of art.

Poetic imagery a.k.a. the personal fave

And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay those pieces of art, that he captured in the Occident, on this blog.

Paying due respect to the occident a.k.a. the artist's signature shot

Note:- This is issued in response to public demand.

An Introvert's Version

Amit points us to this brilliant article by Jonathan Rauch, a complete WOW-WOW-WOW material (as I had put it here in a fellow-introvert's post on the same :P) that left me with a very strong connection, absolute delight, and an immediate thrust to read it all over again and muse over it. Do read; and read over again. Also, read this interview. Oh, thanks so much Amit.
I know. My name is Zero, and I am an introvert; irrefutably so. I guess everybody I acquainted all my life would vouch^[1] for that. Though, eventually for some of them, the perception blurs out (perhaps, they were misled by the “more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined and more sensitive” persona) and they seem to think otherwise. But, I digress.
I was telling you that I was very much that thing, an introvert. Couple this with the extreme cynicism^[2] that sits on my head and you will get a fair picture of how I stood holding^[3] the much-coveted shield that we won during the all-important inter-departmental cultural festival back during my college days. Well if you weren’t imaginative enough (or couldn’t just connect to the introvert-in-a-party situation), I was holding it like how one would hold a bag stuffed with the day’s shopping (a little exaggerated actually, but you get the idea). Of course, I was much delighted. But, my idea of celebration wasn't doing gung-ho jumps or making loud victory gestures.
Here’s another extrovert-introvert write-up that I had read sometime back, which observed, among other things, that I won’t be a popular blogger; something which I knew pretty much myself. {Comrades alert: it does have some unsavory things to say about us like that we are “incapable of making [our] point and [we] would be at a disadvantage passing on the revolutionary new idea that [we] had” and things like that. (Note to self: From when did you start getting revolutionary ideas anyway?)}

[1] - I didn’t conduct any survey asking if I was an introvert or extrovert. (We will leave that to the “people persons”, shall we?) It’s a thing that you can easily know.
[2] - While Jonathan Rauch in his excellent piece decouples a lot of qualities from introversion, I want to know how well introversion and cynicism couple with each other.
[3] - It just so happened that I was the department team coordinator (by default and by default only; but still beats me how I did that!) as all others interested folks had something worthy to do, like actually participating in the events; and I did a little bit of participation too, but that was well-spaced between the moments of deep personal reflection.

Sappily remembering those slaps, albeit a little louder..

This blogger, though pretends to be completely lacking in exhibiting emotions (claiming stuff like his EQ ranges from 5.7 to 5.9), can occasionally go to much-dreaded extremes (which are better left to be explored and examined only by people like Miss Universe title winners, the Chopras, the Johars and our very own Cheran), but will invariably screw it up. This is one such disastrous act that reinstated the fact that, the most embarrassingly funny incidents often happen in real life rather than in fiction (unless written by someone of the order of Wodehouse).

It happened before one could take a little breath and verify the sanity of the proceedings. It all crumbled down in a moment - the pride that you sported on being an awfully good student, the token congratulations you received from many on topping one of those exams, the intimately cherished moments of admiration-meets-envy in the eyes of a girl deeply disturbed because of her exam results (you got to go back to the times when you were still wearing half-trousers to understand this), all of these and much more... - right in front of your eyes.

All was fine until today morning, when my sister happened to stumble on an old classmate of mine. About whom all I remember is that she tried awful hard to beat me in the acads back then and absolutely made no bones of it. In fact, back then, that’s the only thing we all did; envy the opposite sex and try to beat them at the academic levels. (Much later, when I stepped into the college, nobody had to try that awful hard to beat me, though; except for the ones who managed to get consistently less than 3 in one Ms. Thilagavathi’s papers in the cycle tests; I also realized that the fairer sex was left with a lot more interest, at least more than most of their mean counterparts, on the academic arena. Of course, I shrugged it off, as is my wont.)
Back to yesterday's story. My sister talked to her about some nice things which only women can think of; like where they can find the nearest library (to Tidel Park) to get a dignifying cookbook (influential characters: no offence meant; how about, say, Stephen Hawking’s “Brief History of Time”?). Then, they wound up with a token bye and stuff (got to ask if they even managed to hug each other and all). Not to forget that, in between this, she had also asked about me; about the American university in which I am cracking up all the semesters and giving nocturnal headaches to algorithmically challenged professors. Hmm, held in such esteem!
Through Google talk, the first thing my sister told me was of this chance meet; and in the true tradition of Cheran's film repertoire, I happened to reminisce all that happened during my entire school life (assuring myself that I didn't have a disturbed childhood after all) in a moment of flash. My sister is of the enthu-type when it comes to organizing group events like get-together etc. and perhaps, some fractional shades of it must have got stuck to me. I wistfully observed that we never had anything of the sort of a class get-together, and took it upon myself to indirectly instigate such an event.
All buckled up, I dug out a recent “big hi and how I miss you all” mail from a long-lost gossipy friend (one with a high aarva kolaru quotient, a reason why I wanted to contact him) sent to an incipient alumni group (consisting of pass-outs from all the batches) much to the chagrin of those touchy balding folks who hardly knew him. I intended to reply back to the mail (so that his mail id comes up directly in the to-address text box rather than I typing it) and ask about where and what the rest of our classmates are doing and perhaps suggest a get-together. I so-very-carefully pressed the “Reply to Sender” (having committed such grave mistakes before) button and wrote to him asking about the latest happenings. I off-handedly added a line after my name before signing off - a passing mention on a special treatment I got from my Physics sir during my higher secondary school education, an incident which this gossipy guy sadistically recalled every time we entered the physics lab.

yeah, the same one whom Saravanan Sir, quite infamously, slapped twice during his higher-secondary

Perhaps, I should reveal some key details in my defence - that though I was of 16-17 years old, I looked much younger and timid, gaunt and exceptionally intelligent (the man must have envied me for that), all of which must have given the man a curious lead. I had nursed this incident as a top secret all along. [1]
Back to present, I clicked on the send button and as the request was being sent to Yahoo, I noticed the goof-up in the to-bar and pressed the Esc key roughly 1237 times. No positive effect; if you wouldn’t count sending the mail twice as one, that is.
Now, not only my sister (which was quite a cause of concern), but the whole alumni junta, including the prettiest of the girls in my school - who though never ever drooled over me (Girish, updated so that you don't gasp on utter false interpretations), at least thought I was a nice (if not great) student who came out with flying colours in his life and all that - would have come to know of this unfortunate incident (through not one, but two back-to-back mails); that as much as I was cracking those maths papers on one end, I was being slapped tight and clear by that malicious man on the other end; hell, during the phase of ripe adolescence.
Whom should I blame? That jealous classmate, my sister, Google talk, the mushy-trip-down-the-memory-lane films that indirectly influence even the hardcore fans of David Lynch, or that bunch of idiotic folks who wrote Yahoo mail's javascript code in such a way that the group mail-id gets stuck to the to-address text-box how much ever hard the unsuspecting user so-very-carefully presses the “Reply to Sender” button?? Damn!

[1] - But, I should mention that I was stupefied once when a college friend, winking at me, asked about the slaps after having got to know about it in some crooked way, thanks to another sadistic school friend of mine, as I started wondering how many of them were involved in this conspiracy.

Are men words worth? and vice-versa.

The very fact that there are words like ‘true’ and ‘false’ shows that there are alternate truths in this world.
- written long ago, probably after analyzing Rashomon for the umpteenth time.

The network is down; which suggested I should perhaps run ‘winword’ and type some trash. I read somewhere in the blogosphere where the blogger was telling that ‘it’s okay to write crap’. So, I took my inspiration from those words and have started writing this.
In fact, it’s not only okay to write crap. It’s very good to write crap; esp. when you don’t have good stuff to write. like when the network in your office is down (which means you can’t pass off as working for company’s prospects, even if you try or pretend to), and yet you are thoughtless on what to write.
One can smartly suggest that I can write precisely on the state of thoughtlessness (which, of course, is a dreadful cliché). But, this blog is so full of it that it is more of a futile exercise to indulge further into the same.
[The network comes up now, but as per the general principle that should not stop this post from being published.]
If I say that I have been writing crap in this blog all along, some readers out of sympathy or empathy, would {say/ (knowingly/unknowingly) lie} that it is not so, or that I am being humble etc. So to prevent an embarassment of that order, I would not say that. Instead, let me put it this way – much of what I write has happened to be crap; perhaps, like this post. The truth is that, I can't always say myself if what I have churned out is good or not.
[I realize I am still not able to connect to the Internet which means I cannot do what I wanted to - hop through the Indian blogosphere. So, am back to this post.]
Of late, I have been severely criticized among some of my friends for being virtually aimless and further completely glorify it. Discussing on why the state of aimlessness is a “right” thing to do is, again, beaten to death in this blog. But, I also want to concede (as if that puts me in shame!) that am not exactly aimless to the core. In fact, nobody can be. There is, at least a little bit of, incorrigible optimism lurking beneath every human creature.
This brings me to yet another topic that is already covered in this blog. On how words (especially if it is ‘one word’) can’t completely describe any man or his life. That may make somebody question the validity of whole process of writing to express oneself; if it can’t be exactly correct, true or valid. But, the same would apply for every act a human being puts himself through. The validity quotient of any statement is definitely statistical; and that statistics differs with any physical parameter one can think of.

There are words. And there are men. No man is a word. And no word is a man. Both of them are much more than the other.

Contradiction being one of my pet concepts and an area of considerable expertise, I should also state that this post itself isn’t exactly correct. (In general, no write-up can be; but what I mean is, this has not expressed my perception 100% correctly. But, for knowing that, you got to be me.) But, I 'll express them any way; because it, somehow, is a great pleasure; even if you writing is really bad.

End Note: Now that the sole reason why this post has come into existence doesn’t hold anymore, I had two options - to flush it down, or publish it in my blog. But somehow, I seem to have chosen both of them.

On emotions, nostalghia and suchlike

I am not able to clearly distinguish if it started yesterday, or today morning. But, it’s been quite an emotional time (not that I managed to express any) for me; which has become a rarity nowadays as I had mused in my previous post.
Much of what I term as ‘emotional’ and which I claim I went through yesterday were inexplicable (and duly flushed down the toilet). The light state in which I don't understand why I am in a pensive mood soaked in nostalgia. For example, the inexplicability of why I, while trying to recall my childhood, very oddly reminisce, time and again, a rather nondescript day ages ago when I (studying in kindergarten) came along with my amma to my sister's school (who was in her I std.) during her lunch hour and how I cut that big piece of potato using a sharp spoon while having my lunch (or rather my sister's lunch onto which I was barging in; which I am not able to recall now). {Though, on second thoughts, I am able to rationalize it by claiming that this potato-cutting incident has had the privilege of being recalled (as part of recalling-one's-childhood ceremony) every other year and has taken the position of a significant event (by mathematical induction or some shit like that) resulting in this strange sense of nostalgia w.r.t. a nondescript day.}

Or perhaps, this whole thing is not as inexplicable as I make it out to be. May be, it was two days of watching Tarkovsky, thanks to Collective Chaos. But, then it was the 2 days before yesterday and I actually had to miss the best pieces - Nostalghia and The Sacrifice - screened yesterday (Sunday). Or more probably, it was because I spent the whole of yesterday with my elder brother and reconnected to somewhere down the memory lane.
Cutting the story short, it was personally quite an emotional ride (mind you, there was no idle time spent which invoked this wistfulness; we visited a couple of acquaintances and it was late in the night when we came back home) very heavy on the contemplation quotient in which I strived hard to get a moment of clarity. But nevertheless, I did maintain a nonplussed/deadpan countenance all throughout, and gave it all up when sleep and common sense prevailed over.

Life is simple; and it's design, for sure, is impeccable. Here, I am back to normalcy. Mundanity is slyly looking at me. She knows I am incomplete without it, and I understand and accept her inevitability and even the urgency to plunge into her. (Not that I am completely smitten by her. Our relationship, as any other relationship, is bitter-sweet.) I smile at her back, with a tinge of eroticism. You call it a lesser pleasure (now that I have equated it with sex), impure and all such crap. But, I know how well we (I and she) bond with each other.

Life is sad; and that is funny, especially when your EQ ranges from 5.7 to 5.9.

Looking for Comedy in The Real World. (or)How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the... Well, forget it!

{Note to self: This blog is not any more as anonymous as you thought it would be. Presumably, some influential characters may also be reading these posts and you may get some flak elsewhere. So, be nice.}
{
Note to readers (inlivenout, you there?):
1. This blog was supposed to be half-topical on mundanity of day-to-day life, which was unfairly ignored as the blogger started musing more and more on obscenely abstract topics like,
a. why cigarettes originally must have been circular in shape;
b. why there lies a considerable amount of vodka in all human beings somewhere down their stomach, in the pancreas or somewhere; and so on.
2. This could also be seen as a sequel to this post, which quite self-indulgently explained the possibility of absence of love in one's life.
}

In this mundane (now that I haven't used it much till now, the reader will have to bear my using the word time and again from now) existence of ours, it's hard to find and do something exciting on a daily basis. As I was musing on these lines while walking down to my office which is more than 1.5 km from my home, I fancied myself dancing down the roadside, jump up and touch those boisterous tree leaves (who themselves were dancing hard to touch the ground) and sing “Idhu Oru PonmAlai Pozhuthu..”. Loving nature's beauty and all that jazz! But, it was hardly a ponmAlai (for non-tamilians: golden evening). Firstly, it was a morning; and more importantly, it was not remotely close to being golden.
So how else could I pep up this whole thing? I tried something really humane. I thought of smiling at everybody on the road and wishing them good morning (here I must add the indirect inspiration was solely from my visit to U.S. some months ago; my friend used to get all excited as every damn soul wished him a good morning as we start hurriedly from the hotel, everyday to the office). “Plan B”, I told myself and made a mental note of it so that I could reuse these ideas on some other equally bland day. But the task was hugely difficult considering the number of human specimen I had to handle. It becomes further difficult if I count the huge population of dogs (in and around the Airport Road) in for this monumental mush fest. Moreover, there was this guy curiously watching me, as he walked along (there are a host of human species walking on both directions in the much-dreaded Airport Road), since I half-heartedly tried to touch those leaves with a feeble blink-and-you-better-miss jump as part of Plan A. As I was hoping for a Plan C to introduce itself to me, I arrived at my office. Now that the quest for some morning masala to spice it all up failed miserably, my face got a little grimmer and an aura of seriousness crept in. “I am God's own lonely man”, I tried real hard to sound philosophical and get a little too heavy on this issue of extreme blandness (possibly an oxymoron), write a film script out of it and become the next Scorsese. Well, at least, Paul Schrader.

When I was a kid, it wasn't like this. I had various exciting stuff (albeit forced) to do on many days I woke up. Like those special days when I actually brushed my teeth. Parents follow curious techniques to regulate their children brushing their teeth. While some kids used to mop up a lot of paste down their mouth, I was never really too keen (not that I hated it; but I forgot usually) on doing this as a daily task. So, my dad used to place some tooth paste on my brush before he buckles up for the task of the morning, that is to wake us (agreed, I was the worst; but it always feels better to include your siblings) up from our deep (and in my case, heavily philosophical) sleep. There were two reasons. One, I should not put his shaving cream and brush my teeth and let some hair grow on my teeth. Two, he wanted to make sure I actually brush. But now, the magic is completely lost because of an everyday-familiarity that I have struck with my toothbrush, for long time now.

In the current state of affairs, it's indeed hard for one to do something exciting on a daily basis. No rip-roaringly funny incidents, No “divine interventions”, No thrills of somebody secretly following you (and even if so, he/she never carries a gun), no profusely mushy romance. So, there you go. No Wodehouse, No Tarantino, No Hitchcock, not even a Karan Johar, and one usually doesn’t want a David Lynch. For all practical cases, there has been no need for us to be equipped with this thing called EQ, which means people like yours truly have half-lost it. (In fact, I would go a step further and deem the word as ‘unparliamentary’.) Some accept this as a fact, as a mere event. Some, again like yours truly, even romanticize the deadpan quality of the whole thing, and write self-indulgent posts like this.

And quite understandably, the rest of the people, are peeved at this issue to no end. What is surprising is that, in all such cases, the quintessential solution offered is to “go get a girl”! {That they are not available in the “market” yet is a very big fact(or).} So, the indomitably spirited rest, like a friend of mine (let's call him Mr. K with a reason), try hard for the various little possibilities on those lines; which brings us to the romantic life of Mr. K.
A very complicated one, actually. He has totally met 7 girls (the exact number changed, that is increased, so as to protect his identity; and also to salvage some pride for the dear friend) in his life; and most of them, at some point or the other, meant a lot (so much that he actually made the greeting cards himself, that he would hand over to them on a host of random occasions ranging from Friendship day to Pillion-riders day) to him.
But yet, Mr. K is an eternal romantic. Each time he boards a bus to his hometown, he contemplates the possibility of some girl sitting next to him; and on some wild days, he even hopes that she will ask for the magazine that he will be going through; in which case, he goes and buys magazines on topics as boring as say, automobiles. (Here the reader should also appreciate his sense of understanding girl-things.) But then, blame it on the Indian society (easiest thing to do, I tell you). An event that is supposed to be of probability 0.5 (being very fair irrespective of various prospects) is pushed down to as low as 0.01 or worse. Incidentally (or due to some divine conspiracy), yours truly has made more than a hundred travels between his hometown and the city where he lives and haven't had the privilege yet. But I digress.
Let's get back to Mr. K. Of course, the one who sits next to him never happens to be a girl. Even if such a thing happens, the girl always manages to find somebody else, another bleeding male, who is more than ready to shift his place next to poor Mr. K. That chivalrous man has his small milestone for the day and is terribly content with it; but Mr. K is not even allowed to exhibit his already diminishing-beyond-recognition flirtatious skills. (After one such incident, the other man sat, made himself comfortable and gleed at Mr. K, happy that his event of the day has finally happened. Mr. K gave back the shortest and rudest of acknowledgements possible.)
Then one fine day, Mr. K gets to read a preview on Chetan Bhagat's new book, “One night @ The Call Center”. So, the next thing he does is to book his return tickets in a train. (His engineering mind also makes a calculation that probability of a girl sitting among those 6 seats is higher, inspite of all the social conspiracies.) “Train journeys are always comfortable and better!”, he exclaims to himself with a gleam in his eyes, staring at a bright future. But then, as he found later, trains worked much worse for him. Actually, it was fine to start with; and he thought that Chetan Bhagat was indeed a genius. There was one girl sitting just opposite to him. He silently observed her, praying to his favourite God Hanuman, that she would come and ask him to wake her up when the train reaches her destination. Or something like that. That gave him a bright idea. Voila, he can do the same! He kept back the magazine (which was his Brahmastra) back in his bag and asked her if she can wake him up when the train reaches Bangalore. Alas, it so happened that Bangalore was actually the train's final destination. She just gave him a real odd look for a moment, and told him the same. At this crucial juncture, Mr. K laughed out loud, pretending to have cracked one hell of a joke. But by then, the girl had already drowned herself into a magazine; an automobile magazine at that!
Well, Murphy was staring pretty hard at the poor chap. But not being one who gets dispirited easily, he took out his Brahmastra intending to try the same with a prettier lady who was sitting 2 seats next to him. But blame it on the Indian society again; her father was sitting in between the two. That this father guy took the magazine from him, read the whole of it for a couple of hours, then snored all through the night, and never returned it back, made this story a bigger tragedy.
That was Mr. K, hoping to redeem himself from the blandness of his life, for you. At least he did what the majority of the population ends up doing, albeit adding his own touch to it. But, I have seen other friends doing crazier things, which might server as a follow-up to this already obscenely long post.

End note: Well, I think this post wasn't funny at all (and the readers will agree for sure). But, that's the whole point!

P.S.:-
1. Though the author has avoided to mention that Mr. K is a Tamilian in the fear of repeating a fact, now relegated to a cliché, the essence of that word could be associated with terribly exact precision to Mr. K.
2. Day before yesterday (Feb. 14), the author (not wanting to fret over the specific bland quality the day posessed) was at his equanimous best; and planned to go and watch a movie, “Mixed Doubles”. But the tickets were sold out, for obvious reasons. (As a tangential observation, the author also wonders how dangerously that film could work for a couple, giving them new ideas. But that's for another post.) So, he sits back and writes an unfinished piece which he completes much later, that is today.

On why I'll never know the God completely..

Well, you simply adore the man; and he is why you come close to being a theist. You write posts like this in your blog; and keep referring to him in your messenger status.

And then, you get to hear these wonderful songs for the first time (hat tip: Guitar Prasanna; got a chance to listen after reading that article, which btw is a great read, multiple times in the past).

Man.. it's time to eat the humble pie and play that great little gem Pazhaiya Sogangal [1 (rm file), 2 (mp3; resgistration required, go here or use allout/allout ;))] in repeat mode. Ah, Bliss!

Incidentally, Icarus Prakash has had pointed one Mr. Kavi to the same location in an old post in Narayanan's blog. (Though the links he had provided is with the old domain name, www.raajangahm.com, which doesn't seem to work now. In fact that's the case even with the article as well. Will the site admin take note? But for that to happen, I definitely shouldn't be writing in this blog.)

In defence of Bank Robberies

The other day I and my friends were discussing about the different career options we were left with. This post is an off-shoot of that discussion when we suddenly realised that we had been assuming a sense of superiority over a certain breed of human beings, till then. This is to atone for that sin of ours...

There is this charming aspect of bank robbers (or robbers in general) which is often ignored unless it is exhibited by someone of the order of Catherine Zeta-Jones, or suchlike, in a heist flick from the Hollywood. But, I realised their irresistible charm, as late as last week, though I have always had a vague idea about their existence since my childhood (mostly from those heist flicks in which the protagonists come with smart plans to loot huge sums of money from ultra-secure high-profile banks which have stuff like high-precision digital fart-detectors installed).
But this write-up is not about how smart their methods are. If you are interested in that, walk out to the nearest DVD store and pick up a dozen heist films and watch it over the next weekend. Not to forget that this might even ingerminate an idea for a new kind of heist in your mind. In which case, you can either choose to implement the idea and become a martyr. Or, you can write a film script out of it and sell it to the Lakshmi Movie Makers; or, even to Warner Bros., if you fancy.
But, I digress. This one is about the laudable attitudes that those noblemen exhibit; and so it'll be.
Robbers, especially bank robbers, are actually quintessential idol-materials for the bourgeois class, just as the stars of the filmdom are. Let's see why. The bourgeois junta wants money; which they are given when they work. So, they want work. They are given work when they are educated. So, they want to educate themselves. They are educated when they give money, which completes the circle. To cut off this recursion, they in turn expect (quite tragically) their parents (who just got themselves educated for the sake of money) to work and provide the necessary money. This chain of actions extends on and on endlessly, that ultimately the common man forgets why exactly he did whatever he did and ends up professing theories much worse than this write-up when asked about the origin of this vicious cycle.
But bank robbers act differently. They are daring, iconoclastic. They defy all the common norms of living, and how! They realise that all they need is money (like the rest of us) and take the shortest possible route. They drop in to a nearby bank, a place where what-they-want is available in plenty, just snatch considerable chunks, walk out and make a living out of it. Pretty straight, if you ask me.
Let me stop with this final note. It's high time we acknowledge all these qualities in them and have an annual event for bank robberies; Call it the Grand Robbery Mela (we can have a couple of wiki pages too). In which we will keep a bank dedicated for bank robberies and deem robbing that bank as legal. The bank may have all the state-of-art security set up, have people investing in it and can work like any other bank; except that anybody who is caught robbing this bank is not punishable by law. That will be fun and deserving folks will get what they want; rather than we losers having it.

{It might have been be easy to digest this piece if you had already read this. Hmmm.. these stuff might make for a terrible mini-series.}

The elusive 2 bucks between chivalry and penury

Start note:
From now on, this blog will get mundane by the day.
A new series (which, in all probability, will stop with its first edition) will feature in this blog; in which various incidents, which will serve as testimonies for the fact that this blogger is indeed a complete nutcase, will be recalled.

This happenned long ago.

It was early in the morning. The sun hadn't shown its face yet. The time must have been around 5 a.m. I was returning back home from my college. The majority of the travel was already made and I was waiting for a bus (I had to switch buses to reach home) to my hometown which was an hour away; and it was just like any another day. Only that I had a girl (and a very pretty one at that) by my side; and she wanted to have some tea. It's not a regular case that a girl proactively suggests to have tea in a roadside shop. But, she did. The way, I hear, it works is that girls don't walk upto a place like this shop all alone and have some tea. So, when she said she wanted to have some tea, she perhaps meant that I take the baton and bring some tea for her and myself if I want one. My chivalrous inclinations are close to being ineffectual, if not exactly absent. But, I had all that earthly sense required to walk over to the shop and bring some tea for a friend. But, there was one problem; a seemingly simple problem. I didn't have the necessary money. The 2 bucks which was all that was required.
I was not exactly penniless a dozen hours ago. But how I spent what I had speaks volumes about my attitude.

{Here we need to cut to a busy frenzied men's hostel, for a tiny flashback}

The day before this morning, our second semester had ended and we were all relieved. Everybody was busy packing their bags. The stomachs were already craving for great food. As is the general case at the semester ends for the localites (from T.N.), many were short of money. If your friend, who generally is well-equipped with his rich vocabulory of cusswords, approaches you calmly and asks how you did your exams, you know what he is upto. Such was the situation. To recall it now, it is very funny to see how each one of us floundered all the money we had and made sure that we had only the exact money required for our journey back home for the vacation.
Our gang was not too bad on the economic front and we all had pocketed enough money for the fag end to take ourselves home safely. But the problem was that we had some hours to kill after the exams got over in the afternoon, before we take the buses/trains by the night; to our respective hometowns, that is. So, we arrived at this decision - the one that lead to that fateful moment described above. We decided that we will end that beautiful semester season by seeing a movie. We quickly got ready and headed over for the evening show in a theatre called Maris Mini (or was it the porn theatre that was called Maris Mini? I forget!) to watch the biggest hit in the town, Minnale. The movie had already completed more than 150 days and was relegated to this mini theatre for jobless folks like us who kept watching movies again and again. Now, we were all financially equipped till then. More important to this story, is that I was financially equipped till then. But, fate would have it otherwise.

{Here we need to cut to our computer centre, for a tinier flashback}

A couple of weeks before, during the semester examinations, I received this mail from that girl that she is gong to book the tickets in one particular bus to go home for the vacation and she can book a ticket for me too (through her dear uncle who stays within the local limits; and to whose place she visits to satisfy her hunger for tasty food, I presume) if I want it that way. I replied back saying that I would indeed like my ticket booked. Now, she was not a very dear friend and the only connection between her and me was that we came from the same place. It was very nice of her to ask this and I accepted it flatly with not much gratitude, as if I deserved a ticket from her. But, that was characteristic of me.

{Cut back to the little theatre Maris Mini}

Ashok (one of the vile friends who accompanied me) was reasoning why he would not pay for the ticket and I should do it.
Ashok: "Dei.. unakku thaan un aalu* ticket book panni vechirukkaalla.. Enakku oorukku poga thaan panam irukku.. unakku ticket reserve panniyaachu.. so ippo ticket'ta nee thaan edukkara!".
The socialist in Ashok was speaking, I realised.
And for all the naive and innocent person I was, I agreed to what he said. I went ahead and bought the tickets for the grand team of 3 people to watch the film. The theatre was pathetic to say the least and had a mono-speaker on the right end of the screen; and we had paid something around 40 bucks per head for this. More importantly, all from my pocket. But, I enjoyed the movie nevertheless, with least botheration about the fact that I had less than 20 bucks when I am supposed to travel for about seven hours in the night. Once the movie was done, I bade goodbye to the folks and caught a bus and reached the main bus stand.
There in the bus stand, to top it all, I indulged myself further. My dear reader, I further filled my appetite with a coke!

{fades out as the protagonist has a couple of gulps of the priceless coke he just bought}
Little did I know then, that there would be a moment when I would be expected to buy a cup of tea for 2 bucks, a simple act which fate would deny me from doing.
{fade in back to the tea shop}

She asks, "Shall we have some tea?"
Of course, I would have loved a good tea. But, I having a cup of tea will just increase the already alarming probability of I reaching a situation in which I will have to to confess how ended up penniless, to a pretty girl (repeat, a very pretty girl).
I replied back, with my thoughts and fingers lingering around my empty wallet, "No.. I generally don't have tea." I further condescended to tea - "I hate the way it smells.."
And then stolidly accompanied her, walking well behind so as to avoid any chances of she expecting (it's a meagre 2 bucks after all) me to take the wallet out, till the shop, watched her pay and drink all of that tea.
Once we got into a bus that leads to our hometown, I told her, "You take the tickets for me too. I will give you the net sum later. I guess I don't have the change.", pretending to be making an off-handed request.

* - Aalu roughly translates to a girlfriend, and of course, Ashok was bantering about when he referred to her as my Aalu, as yours truly never got anywhere near. My EQ ranges from 7.5 to 7.9, btw.

End note:
I wonder how funny she would find this account of mine if she reads it. But never mind, this blog has hardly a handful of readers :).

Mr. Zero goes to the Bookfair (pun intended)

This blogger is a complete nuthead and wades through the life for very unobvious reasons. Most of what he thinks, talks or writes is about (or, related to) films. This time he revives a little bit of his enthusiasm towards books, which has come in intermittent fits in the past, and goes to the Chennai Book Fair 2006.
This time he ventures into the bookfair mainly for some Tamil books (IHHO, this bookfair is just not the place for English books). He is truly an ignorant chap when it comes to Tamil books. Not that he is a voracious reader of English literature. But, at least, he had those fits of enthusiasm at different times.
That, he somehow managed to get his stories (and even some dimwitted poems) written in Tamil published in his college Thamizh Mandram website is something he is able to look back and laugh at.
The only Tamil poem this blogger ever recited (yeah, he never wrote poems, a la Gunaa; once he recited this "poem" jocularly mocking the poem competition his literary friends conducted; however, they went ahead and published it in their website!) read something like this.

Thoorathil paarthaal, unnai kaattum...
Arugil paarthaal, ulagai kaattum... Kannaadi!

The poem is paraphrased and pullis and aacharya kuris added for desired effect, if any.

Back to yesterday. He makes a rich haul of 6-7 Tamil books, a personal record; much of which were suggested in this blog; like Aathavan's En Peyar Ramaseshan (one of the prime reasons for the reason of his visit) and Kaagitha Malargal; and also Sujatha's Eppothum Penn. He also picks S. Ramakrishnan's (who, he hears, wrote some excellent articles in Aanantha Vikatan; but somehow chooses not to buy those - Thunaiezhuthu and Kathaavilaasam - because he expects some acquaintance of his to buy/must be already having it) Urupasi.
Even the last year he did visit the bookfair; but didn't look beyond film-related books. From what he remembers, he bought the screenplay of Santosh Sivan's film Terrorist. {There were screenplays for a host of movies made in other languages. But he doesn't exactly like the idea of reading the screenplays of other language films in Tamil. He prefers either seeing the film subtitled, :p, or at least reading an English translation}. This time, he buys this book, if his memory serves him right titled Nadippu Enbathu Enna?, written by Mahendran (he has already read Mahendran's Cinemaavum Naanum and the screenplay of his masterpiece Uthiri Pookkal, before) and a bunch of issues of Thirai, one of those low-profile high-brow Tamil film magazines (like Uyirmai and Kaalachuvadu), the contents of which he mostly disagreed (quite vehemently) with, in the past.
Also among the picks were Sundara Ramasamy's Oru Puliyamarathin Kadhai (about which he has heard his friend rave about) and Vaanagamae Ila Veyilae.
The funniest of all, he buys this book called Naalu Moolai, a collection of essays by Ra. Ki. Rangarajan published in Annanagar Times, just because the cover looked good![*] Though, he would rationalize it by saying that, he did have immense liking and respect towards Ra. Ki. Rangarajan, because of the simple reason that the same writer co-wrote the dialogues of the film which he considers as the best of Tamil cinema.

[*] - The man in the same stall kept suggesting this new book about the Travis Bickle'ish lives of software engineers in India (apparently, a first of its kind in Tamil literature) whose title he has forgotten now. He should try it later.

Thank-you Note:
Lazygeek and Chenthil.

End note:
Time for some good reading!

Update (on Jan 17 10:46 a.m.):
This blog has no readership whatsoever. But, just in case, if somebody chose to click on the link to this blogger's published short story and entertain himself/herself, he/she might have to use IE; and even worse, install fonts from here.