Random Thoughts of a Frustrated Mind

On Perfection

2012-02-01T23:23:00.001+05:30

We run our tiny rat races to achieve little perfections of our own. The right job where your bank balance is cool and your colleagues and bosses love you, the right school where the friends have just the right quotient of fun and sincerity, and the right relationship where you have all the love in the world, and the least fights to go with it.

There are I think two perfections we come across in every sphere of life. One that's the idea and one which is the reality. The mind has the liberty to create perfections from various strands of experiences. We all want a bit of this and a bit of that; combine them and the mind has the perfection ready in a jiffy. I think this mind's perfection often makes one overlook the little real ones that life offers us time and again. While waiting for the ideal picture to take shape, we might forget to acknowledge what we really have. But then, that's how we all are.

Observations.

2011-12-16T01:56:00.000+05:30

I'm typically one of those sad fellows who finds immense joy in observing the lives of others. That compensates for the lack in life, and also contributes humbly to the popularity of Mark Zuckerberg. Very Utilitarian, I know. And what better than human bondages, and their severances. Anyway, so break ups are always supposed to be this sad affair that involves some hours of sentimental tear jerking, sniffs, reminiscences, what-ifs and some more of tear jerking. But everything has a positive side, I'd always like to believe.

Post severances of alliances, one is liberated for a while, and that's when one can fondly check out the girls on the road without pangs of guiltiness (basing this on a dubious assumption that guilt pangs were felt when alliances were intact). One's monthly budget is generously reduced, and one is not scolded for not calling up, or calling at the wrong time, or calling at the right time with the wrong purpose, or calling at the wrong time with the wrong purpose. A lot of trouble is solved at one go. There might be sudden feelings of being left alone for the rest of the life or something like that. But it's never like that. The world has too many people, and on top of that there are also too many people who wouldn't mind maintaining two or more relationships. Nothing can be too bad in this world. ;)

December Resolutions

2011-12-08T21:41:00.001+05:30

So time is running fast. A few days ago there was January, and a whole new year ahead of me. And now it's December. Resolutions never work for me. I am too irresolute a person to tackle with New Years' Resolutions. Getting some adipose has always been there in the list. But needless to say, that's not happening as you all know. But it's December. And I like the racy feeling of having lots to do and having too little time for all that. Somewhat like life, squeezed into the remnants of a month.

I'd like to cross the river on a ferry once more. Get on to the top of a really tall building from where I can see the two bridges as well as Victoria Memorial. The grand skyline always makes me feel that I'm just a tiny dot in this big world, and it's a nice feeling. I'd like to see the night sky and stars for a long time. I'd like to hear the ship's siren from the docks near Calcutta on 31st midnight. I miss that since my six year-old days. I want to be on the college grounds. This shall probably be the last time I look at it like this. I want to sing myself hoarse with people whose company I cherish. I want to go to school and sing Christmas carols. I want some Decembers back. There's so much to do in a fraction of a month. A few days later there'll be a new month, and a whole new year ahead of me.

I think, therefore there's boredom

2011-12-04T18:59:00.003+05:30

I am fond of reading. In fact with time I am realising that I am so fond of it that I'm quite dealing with a lifestyle dangerously close to being sedentary. Of course the adipose associated with isn't providentially turning up, but then that's one hope I've given up. I had resolved to read a certain book by this year and am having to deal with it now that it's December and the Earth is revolving a bit too fast for me it seems. The book talks about how certain criminals are necessary for the greater good, or something like that. All fair and all that. It did set me into thinking deep.

I've been thinking about having thoughts. Thoughts that I often sentimentally deem profound because of my inherent quality of self-appreciation; a view that most does not share with me for logical reasons. And I think of life, the world around me, the cows and people living on grass, on people not living on grass, and all the remaining stuff that one can think about to kill time. And I by divine intervention realise the whole problem of mankind. It's thinking. Whatever Descartes may have had to say about it being the essence of being and all that, thinking kind of tends to make things a mess.

I mean, the basic thoughts are quite okay. Look at the early men, of course they thought on some levels. They slept, ate, procured food, mated like bunnies and scooted off to heaven sooner or later. Constructive thinking obviously led to fire and all that jazz, but I suppose they wouldn't be too fond of reading stuff that are supposed to have a deep impact on the intellect of mankind. I think a lot, mostly because I am too lazy for anything otherwise; but there are times when I suppose one needs to pause all that profound intellectual brain-digging for sometime, and be at peace. Else, boredom inevitably follows.

All that mush

2011-12-01T22:04:00.003+05:30

There's something about agony aunt columns that hugely attracts me. I mean, who wouldn't like to read about sixteen year old hormonal beings confused about which girl to choose, what alcoholic experiments to indulge in or ask the very pertinent question of which is better: studies or sleazy movies. Of course relationships receive primary focus.

I wonder what it is about relationships that makes it so popular. Look at the movies, agony aunt columns, advertisements, songs, story books. Almost all has some liberal dose of man-woman bonding. So there are those stories where one specimen of human nature wants to bond with another specimen, or there's the case of actual bonding, or cases of post breaking up of bonds between human specimens. The good stories bring in multi-specimen-bonding angles resulting in infidelity of some sorts that ironically make it all the more charming. (I mean, look at Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in You've got Mail. They both were cheating on their partners on some sort of a higher level but it is to me of the best romantic movies I've ever seen).

And thus love is always in the air. Or at least some other forms of it that can be passed off as such when garnished well. There's the hopefulness of finding new love, the happiness or the stagnant phase of worn out love stories and the post-break up love stories of the single hearts. However macho one might be, I suppose it's hard to ignore the mush, when it is all around you.

2011-11-11T00:06:00.002+05:30

So, it's good weather alright. Of course everyone has noticed. So has their cameras which now is busy capturing the nascent wintriness that's all around us. Subtle, gradual, yet timid. There are pictures in the memory cards thats ready to be published on the favourite online networking sites with a copyright sign making it vehemently one's own, however ocassionally unphotogenic it may be. There's soon going to be pictures of pretty people with their new winter clothes that now adorn their wardrobe. There's going to be status updates of the foggy mornings and the lazily late suns. Happy ones. For we feel what we express. A few scribbly blog updates about how heavenly and breathtaking nature really is when it is in a mode of metamorphosis. A few more expressions without really coming in touch with people. Are you alone as you see winter come? Not really. Are you not alone? Well, again, not really. There's the virtual modes of communications you see, where we choose to express ourselves as the world turns cold around us.

Songs.

2011-10-25T20:30:00.001+05:30

It would have been sad if music was the monopoly of musicians. As I sit in my room while the world around me proudly shines in festive glory, I hear around me the music that my city hums on its own. May be, nothing is without rhyme and reason. Everything in this world has their rhythm, their pattern that they can call their own. The universe of our mind has a cosmic regularity that aberrations often make us take note of. It would be a pity if we reduced music to what only predetermined instruments can make, because in reality it is everywhere. It is in the wind of the thunderstorm that gives a thrill in our heart and makes the heartbeat come truly alive; in the footsteps as we trace a line along the squares of the red pavements in the city of joy; in the raindrops on the tinned rooftops of fallen buildings, in the river as the oars stride against it under the backdrop of the grand bridges that caress the skyline of the old capital with old glories; in the silent breathing of the dejected dog forlorn in the corner of the pavement; in the verses of a poet; in the water from the tap, slowly easing itself, in the dead of the night when the world is asleep; in the silence of the night when the cricket sings; in the punctual regularity of moonshine, in life itself. There’s a hidden song everywhere. And that makes me feel nice about everything else.

Good Ol' Fairytales

2011-10-20T02:29:00.001+05:30

Cinder-Mann was typically the tragic being. Oppressive alcoholic father and a spendthrift sister who'd burn a hole in his pocket before he could replenish it with his salary. He was sad.

He'd while away his time reading books and hoping that the world would become a greater place. The father married time and again for the fun of it, and ended up being quite a bit serious about a rather pretty widow with two kids of her own. Now Cinder-Mann had two other kids burning holes into his little pocket. Sad story. Some say that the brothers were ugly and mean and described them using all the negative words possible. But I secretly believe that it was just to increase the great tragic quotient of our hero. However, the fact remains that he was having a tough time and couldn't see any silver lining whatsoever.

There was a big party in the city palace where Princess Charming was coming. Some say she looked like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. She wasn't really a princess you know. But she was, well, quite swell. And men admired her both for her looks and her sharp tongue that would win both the hearts and the intellects. Cinder-Mann wanted to go. But he felt like William Thacker of Notting Hill or something like that. Well, Charming was way out of his league, and while his step-brothers happily dressed up to woo the lady, Cinder-Mann sat near the fire moping about his distress.

And then suddenly came a fairy. She asked for weird stuff like mice and pumpkins. But while our hero suspected her to be some sort of a loony medieval witch, she had in the mean time created a dazzling coach and sparkling suits that made our man look like a movie hero. Seriously, sometimes all it takes to take off commonness is good clothes.

Anyway, he went to the ball and princess was visibily smitten by his charm. Yet when the clock struck twelve, the man disappeared, leaving behind a shiny boot. The princess looked for it and later found Cinder-Mann distressed, sitting in rags. She was a nice person and asked him to tell what happened. He narrated his sad story while she patiently listened. Due to her charitable disposition, she married the chap. Of course, divorce ensued but the alimony was enough for Cinder-Mann to live happily ever after.

Excessive ramblings of a fellow who likes to type, and a thing called contentment

2011-10-19T00:24:00.003+05:30

Most of the philosophical brouhahas are about life, to define them in a nutshell. I'm not a cynical person and therefore I don't see life as a series of agonising days where my primary desire every morning is to slash my wrists and see how people mourn my plight. Sentimentality is fine. We all need bits and pieces of it to stay in tune with emotions. But when sentimental extravaganza spills over into pessimism-filled distaste towards everything life has to offer, it is, to put things mildly, a bit over the top. One might argue that I, having a peaceful life so far, am clearly too unaware and immature to comment on a matter so serious. Of course I can't defend that. Immaturity is just another human trait in me that I cannot get rid off.

We all hope for something better that's going to happen at some point of time. We look back upon good times with tinges of nostalgia and silent sniffs somewhere around the olfactory area. But let us face it, we live right at the moment. The rest are either dreams or memories lived. Somewhere down the line, I feel it is so much more important to realise that all the hurdles that life presents us are merely an obstacle to clog our greater picture. They are like the small air-pockets that aeroplanes often plunge into. More often than not the big birdie manages to fly alright. (Of course those prematurely deceased due to plane crashes are cursing me from above). I've always wanted to be happy. Till I realised that there's nothing to plan for. I'm happy for the moment anyway. And that makes a lot more sense than what the past gave or what the future holds.

Disclaimer: This view of life is subject to momentary whims.

On hope, festivity and growing up.

2011-09-29T12:18:00.004+05:30

Too much enthusiasm is detrimental to health. Sometimes, the mind is in a state of utopia. Everything works according to your own will. And then there's the collusion with reality that erodes much of it's dreaminess.

Welcome to the festive season. It's the season of make or break romances, heart burns, vanity, larger than life realities and realisations of the unmakings and makings of friendships. The world shrinks itself into the city with make-belief palaces cropping up here and there, glittery streets that otherwise wear an old forlorn look, girls with prettiness painted on their faces and others wearing their hearts on their sleeves with much elan. There's music. Not a single street is devoid of them. And there are short midnight naps and exciting mornings when one looks forward to their single day of living larger than life, going beyond the mundane humdrums of everyday details. And there's hope of something magical happening each day.

Hope is one of those greatest shatterer of hope itself. No reality can live up to the expectations the mind creates for oneself. It's the festive season. Sometimes, I think, one just needs to realise that inspite of the unwillingness to accept it, we've grown up into prim and proper grown-ups. The type we used to hate when we were kids. The ones who'd curtail our freedom, be it the ice cream cone or the battery-operated aeroplanes that would transform our rooves into giant airfields. Enjoyment has reduced itself to hours of pre-planning, worries and joyous recalling and consolations of the one day of every three-month when we all can say we enjoyed, pictures hoarded up for the world to see are the required proofs. We;ve learnt the art of deliberation and rejection. But on our way to become composed adults, I suppose we had to lose the child in us.

Creeks in the city

2011-09-19T19:11:00.003+05:30

I saw the sea in the heart of the city today.

No, I'm not delirious. True story. My college is in an area where even if you have one of those little fountains under which Jaya Prada used to dance in her movies, there's going to be some great amount of water-logging. And I saw the city come alive amidst all the discomfort. Students grumbling on their way back, would remember this day when they fondly look back upon their college days, little boys on their way back experimenting in knee deep murky water as if they didn't care for all the dirt... every mother's nightmare. Cars almost wading slowly, wipers fast moving, trousers up till the knees, umbrellas bright, clashing against low lying roofs of roadside second hand bookstalls that has a misty smell of old books and moist wind, the college folks of the male kind hoping that the pretty ones of their female counterpart will do a Sridevi stunt in the rain, hawkers hurrying to take their items off the road before the water devoured them, Hand-pulled cycle rickshaws suddenly getting a life back from their collective demise as people realise they are the only comfortable mode of transport in the temporary creeks of the city, Ambassadors showing their might over the sleeker cars, food stalls bursting with people, wet umbrellas and murky shoes. As life went on.

Just another day went by. While I was safely huddled in a car hoping that the water won't seep into the engine, I saw my city come alive around me.

On the art of herding

2011-09-15T22:02:00.003+05:30

Much of my college life’s pedagogic moments have been spent trying to make sense of polite squabbles amongst intellectually superior historians. Not that I mind, because debates and discourses are supposed to make us mortals become enlightened soul and all that. But such scholarly debates are often boring to our spring-like minds, to say the least.

The historical debates go something like this:

Elton: There was a Tudor Revolution in Government.

Other chaps: No there weren’t.

Elton reloaded: Yes there was, (with modifications on his views, and slightly annoyed but refuting with gusto)

Some other chap: no there weren’t… and then a lot of other intellectual fellows have a go at it. (The uninitiated reader drops dead... I eagerly survived because of an excellent Professor who made them very interesting and won our hearts in the process). Anyway, such scholarly debates can be intellectually stimulating and all that, but often not very humorous.

Hence, a blog-debate was much fun to read. A fellow blogger explains with much humour ingrained with an idea of the reality that is essential, the pain in the posterior that stereotypical attitudes can be, as a reply to another post where another fellow soul of the female kind ranted about the libidos of dilliwalas amongst other things in a way as if all the stupid, men of the world are imported from Delhi annually. (To be fair, though I don't agree with the view, it was fun to read).

It set me thinking. I mean, we all do have our sets of stereotypical notions I suppose. It’s the notion that one’s stereotypical notions are infallible is what becomes troublesome to those who oppose it. I’ve come across people look down rather snobbishly upon people who prefer Bollywood movies to Parallel cinemas, (or conversely, judge people by their appreciation of Truffaut, Fellini and the likes who by the way are becoming so popular amongst the intellectuals that they run the risk of becoming massy and thus losing their aura). Or categorise the Chetan Bhagat fans as uneducated. I mean, it’s okay to not like Chetan Bhagat or Bollywood. But no one is making it compulsory for you to marry that particular fellow who appreciates all these stuff. So one might as well give the neurons some rest.

And let us accept it. All Bengalis are not fond of Tagore. He was this awesome chap no doubt, but one really can breathe, eat, drink, be merry and do all that even without going head over heels for him or singing his songs in every possible occasion. Also, all men here don’t play football, or have midnight dreams about Sourav Ganguly.

Nevertheless, however much we shall rant, India is too big a country to let go of stereotyping people. It’s like, if you have a farm with two sheep, you might name them Tom and Harry. But if you have a hundred, you might as well address them simply as that big flock of sheep. (I am not great at explaining, and this is the best I could manage). Matrimonial columns are the best example of stereotypical ideas. From the description of girls, it often seems that all are running after the same girl who is tall, fair, convent educated, of a particular caste, can cook, can sing, dance, knit, have a superbly fertile interior to top it all.

Anyway, come what may, the art of randomly categorising people shall remain eternal I suppose. I've been there, done that. But at least we can be mature about it.

On Reading

2011-08-26T00:36:00.000+05:30

The lonely soul's companion and pillow-friend since adoloscence, reading often is a more desired choice than people themselves. But I suppose that's more so because the characters are what you interpret them to be. In case of people, they are what they interpret themselves to be, and the choosy human mind can't always adjust with the inadjustments. Of course, such is only one of the cases and not the only one. Appropriate disclaimers always have their roles.

As we aspire to study more and become worldly wise, we try to grow into an intellectual level that is distinctly different, nay, loftier than the general mass. There are the austere readers who not only chide those who do not read, but also those who read books that the aforementioned strict fellows does not themselves like. There are the readers who believe that one who doesn't read isn't made the proverbial man. They say books are supposed to broaden our minds. But often, contempt for anything less intellectual does a wonderful counter-productive job of narrowing it.

The walls are adorned with the Kafkas, Camus and Doestovoskys. One is often proud of their knowledge of all the big names of letters. often the more obscurely famous, the better. But it takes a lot more than reading, to broaden one's mind with the fodder of ones intellectually stimulating textual pleasures

Being Original.

2011-08-21T12:35:00.004+05:30

I'm tired of trying to create nice imageries in my writings. I start with a high on sentimentality enthusiasm but it ends with a dejected whimper. Too much inspiration kills the originality within.

That brings me to the weird question: where does one's originality lie? Since a kid, one is being taught to articulate the rules of life according to set social norms. Therefore, the impressionable mind of the kid learns to stick out her tongue mockingly at a passerby because some other bored fellow did the same to her. Not very original, but then, it has not been a terribly conscious attempt at imitation. Hence, pardoned.

The madmen that you see on the road doing stuff that you wouldn't imagine doing on the roads is being original. But no one's going to give the chap some super-hyped prize for originality. One's services are original and not bordering on lunacy when it is restricted to socially accepted norms. Be original, but within limits of course. Abberations can scare the hell out of people, and that is just not very nice. We are sensitive folks, you see.

2011-08-13T22:02:00.002+05:30

There are two kinds of people I know of, one is sad, the other is happy-sad. It is so much easier to be sad. The old philosophers always tried to find out the dazzling key to happiness, and apart from a few cool Hedonist chaps, most of them gravely say that happiness is in God/The Ultimate/salvation and all that. I mean, eternal happiness is always seen in something that we cannot perceive. (Oh yes apart from the Paolo Coelho-ian 11 minutes maximum, as they say). Happiness is seen as momentary flashes, episodes in our lives that predominate the memory often, like a mother seeing her newborn. It's not eternal because life provides us with too many things otherwise. But sometimes we forget the charm of this little happy moments to try to seek the Greater thing that in all probability is too intangible.

We strive for the eternal bliss. Paradoxical as it may sound, we take immense pain in trying to achieve it as well. And we are so shifty in our idea of happiness. There's joy in winning, and conversely there's joy in seeing someone else lose. It gives a feeling of contentment to know that what you probably could not do, someone else cannot either. The confidence grows at the expense of someone else's failure, unable to interpret the fact that the same failure might at some time be yours.

We mortals have created bubbles around us of self confidence. They work as long as they aren't pricked hard enough. After that, we all are the same vulnerable souls.

P.S: It's not bad to contemplate once in a while, I guess. :P

Monetary woes

2011-06-29T13:29:00.002+05:30

Money sometimes matters you know. Assured full scholarship provisions can deal with the rest. I used to study in a school where 50% of the students couldn't pay their fees while the rest of the students who could afford, paid slightly more to compensate. And, albeit your criticisms, I think most students come out from the school as socially aware adults. It is imperative that an institution should use the resources of those who can afford, to compensate for those who cannot. I don't know much about economics but my common sense says it is simply a case of transference of money from those who have surplus to the coffers of the deficit areas. Provided fiscal assistance is assured for those who cannot afford right from the beginning, I don't see why the rest can't dole out more. I mean, say, simply by cutting down one's smoking costs, one can balance the whole thing you know. The question then isn't about money over merit, but the development of the fund of an institution like Presidency planning to perch itself on the road to success.

(This is a personal response to some students' movement against fee hike in Presidency University.)

On grievances. :|

2011-06-03T21:26:00.005+05:30

Often, the quietness outside is endearing. In the darkness and silence of the night, one can see a whole new world come out of nowhere, busily making the most of time till daylight breaks. The shadows play, the little door in the corner creaks to let out a cat that stealthily got into the unaware kitchen. The world outside is sleepy, resting after the tiring day. And one feels content and happy, and thinks about all the good times and all that is gleeful, garnished with red heart balloons.

Not when the God-cursed city behaves like it's a big boiling tub of sweat. I was about to be more descriptive but certain things are better left unsaid. Next to extensive water-logging inducing monsoon, summer seriously annoys me. I never could get it why Enid Blyton would talk of summers in such an endearing way, but of course it was like our winter. One would obviously find that great.

This weather makes one think of all the jobs left unfinished, all the things to work on the eleventh hour of yet-another-examination, all the people with whom closure was never achieved in the form of choicest hard hitting one liners that sound very cool in one's head, all the good food that wasn't eaten because the humidity makes you question the honour of mutton biriyani, all the sunscreen advertisements, and all the food that turned awry but you've realised that only after they've settled in your hapless stomach.

It's just June. And the monsoon's to follow that I think is tolerable provided I'm not on the road.

Happy mid-summer, fellows. May it not make you as lousy as it makes me.

A glum cheerio,

-Lousy mind personified.

On one's calling and all that

2011-05-22T14:10:00.003+05:30

The world often intimidates me. (Had I been appropriately intellectual, I would have dared to comment that it amuses me, and get away with it). I am one of those typical nerds who likes to sit with her dog eared books and read about how a sixteenth century king managed his extra-marital affairs. It's like tabloid for the insipid. In brief, as many claim, I am one of those fellows who live in a slightly different generation altogether, unaware of the fast-paced reality around us. Ah well. My shortcomings.

I see people around me doing unimaginably enterprising tasks. There are fellows who are suave talkers, fellows who get into great professional courses that provide them with cool jobs at the end of the day, while they are happy to see their books out of their shelves and houses. But there are some fellows who actually like to study you know. Of course when some remark that history is all about mugging up and is appropriate for the dimwitted and the uninitiated, One usually complies with their humble observations. The proverbial case of each unto his own.

I intend to stay in academics, mostly because I am nerdy and I am not enterprising enough for anything else. To be fair, I'll enjoy it too. (or so I think till I change my decision) I once thought of taking up journalism as a career option but halfway down college I realized that it isn't exactly my Calvinist calling. And as I came to conclusion with one of my college fellows, what better than history to be an intellectual prick in the adipose-blessed posterior merely by quoting one's syllabus?

But somewhere down the line, I just don't think it is easy to convince some people that one can actually look forward to an un-enterprising geeky uncool life, appreciating it as way better than slogging all the time without getting enough time to sleep, you know.

Oh well, the intricacies of the mature world.

Old school thoughts. :)

2011-05-20T20:57:00.003+05:30

Once upon a time when I was nine years old with two pigtails and a height that didn't evolve much later, I remember staring at the fan when I was trying to sleep. As I looked at it, I thought proudly of my sister who'll be leaving school to enter college that year, and I convinced myself that if I blinked hard enough, I might reach grow ten years older to become her age, the moment I woke up. (I was a dreamy lousy unsocial kid then, so my past time consisted of such weird science-defying approaches towards life).

Somewhere down the line I have grown-up remembering this little idea of mine. I blinked in the normal rate I assume, but nevertheless the day came by quite soon. And passed.

It's strange that years pass faster nowadays. It seems like it was a few days ago when I promised myself that I my first priority will be my old associations, as I survived the first class in college. And now we are about to become the senior-most, and priorities have uneasily shifted to and fro with a natural grace that makes it harder to complain.

I like the laid back life where we won't have to worry of what's going to become of the future. But it does bother me as unfortunately no matter how wise I try to pretend, this is my temperament.

All of a sudden, when I remember those days when I wished to grow up in a jiffy, I wonder if my wishes have been granted too fast.

But then, I was a dreamy lousy unsocial kid then, so this has been an improvement.

On imperfection/perfection.

2011-05-16T21:03:00.006+05:30

Did you ever have this desperate desire for perfection in all spheres of life when there's an examination coming up? The rare regular readers of this blog (which consists of mostly the narcissistic me) will know that examinations give me an extra adrenalin rush to blog, and hence I have to comply with one of my typical posts.

The world suddenly comes alive when the only alternative (and for the rather not-so-happening people like me, often the only choice) is to study. I came back home from a very happy evening with friends coated lavishly with sentimental mutual thoughts like 'what will happen when college ends' and all that brouhaha; and saw that the current was gone and the sky was dark and starry. The moonlight had created shadows with the trees, trying to boast of it's borrowed glories. I took a brisk walk in the backyard (surprisingly for a thin person like me, I am excessively fond of walking) and had one of those realisations of how merry life is and et cetera.

Without the impending sadness of examinations I wouldn't have seen life with such saccharine-tinted glasses. Not to say that I dislike examination, but I do hate the idea of preparing for them, and I'm not much of a daredevil to actually sit for an important one without preparing. The results shall hurt the Great Female Ego, which, contrary to popular perception, does exist, you know.

My mother now is perpetually surprised (and I dare say pleased) because I more or less clean my room regularly and not only that, I am often seen at 4 am in the morning with a vacuum cleaner and a grim mission to set scores with the dusts in the whole apartment. Added to my life-long passion and ability to kill cockroaches and delicately hurl other winged things out of the balcony, this is a renewed me that my mother must necessarily be proud of. (However, I usually made peace with dirt before. But with time I must have become somewhat of a lousy grown up in face of examinations, and I can see my future with a broom and a cat for company).

Whenever I sit to study, I find some obscure book in the shelves out of order, or the edge of the bed-cover folded to my dislike. The window just isn't appropriately open or the speed of the fan just can't reach perfection. The whole world crumbles around me with it's imperfections and I embark upon my journey to straighten that small representation of the world that my room and periphery offers. Of course the greatest imperfection is left unattended, and it occasionally logs on to write obscure blogs. But there are certain things that just can't be mended.

Now that I study a subject whose understanding lies in higher studies and beyond (and I am sure it will remain as vague to me even then), examinations won't let go of me. Hence with much reluctance I must admit that I can see the path to my future well from here.

However, if my sister was reading this post, she would be happy beyond her senses; but a warning goes out to her that I am hopeful that such behaviour is temporary. And my sense of cleanliness and hers is radically different anyway. :|

The Great Indian Stalker.

2011-04-09T19:46:00.007+05:30

It's tough being unaware of the political scenario, really. I have tried to be so but rather unsuccessfully. I mean, they budge in between my life so often that I think these fellow Gods of Indian Politics have quite successfully managed to make themselves heard by us attempting-to-be not-bothered youthful spirits. A few days ago I was trying to return from college and merrily hopped on to an auto. As it glided through the alleys that in other times repeatedly make one realise of the rising population, I knew something was brewing up ahead. Of course I was not wrong. There was the lady-in Opposition doing her I-walk-alone stunt much to the amazement of arthritis ridden fifty somethings and the annoyance of punctual me.

As I entered my home after fumbling for keys inside my politically-symbolic khadi side-bag which resembles the hippie culture more than Gandhi would have approved of, an sms urged me to support Anna Hazare. It made me recall that in the morning my mother and I were intently gazing on the picture of the old chap and saying if he was thinner he'd definitely look like Gandhi. My mother voted him to be a Lal Bahadur Shastri look-alike. Very politically conscious peeps we are. I mean, I am grateful that someone has finally given a do-or-I-won't-eat challenge to the government. I like the Congress chaps. BJP peeps were too saffron for my taste. But that does not mean that the high and mighty fellows are going to get away with corruption. While they stack moolahs into their designer bags and Swiss banks, I don't even get swiss chocolates. Not fair I insist.

Of course one sms doesn't provide such a big chain of thought. Just typed a bit too much. Nevertheless, when I switched on the television, there was Arnab Goswami barking out loud somewhere and I hurriedly changed the channel to see some sober chap of similar profession. I logged in to my Facebook account to see the same news of the anti-corruption chap and my friends commented away to glory.

And I wondered. We desi fellows are an interesting lot. The Great Indian Political Bandwagon always harries us with something or the other. For people like me who has a comfortable life and decent education, we can't get away with not being politically conscious. It's very funnily inter-woven with almost every aspects of our lives. And a good thing that it is.

P.S: This is a little bit dedicated to the chap who said long time ago in MTV Roadies that the current President of India is Rajiv Gandhi. Amen.

:|

2011-03-25T00:51:00.002+05:30

There's a wind outside every evening that to the romantics will bring in some desired hormonal surge, to the less-lethargic ones the desire for a brisk walk, and to people like my mother, the idea of chicken pox. Well, it's the proverbial case of each unto his own.

As I sit in the balcony I see a lonely cow chewing what looks like grass. (I don't know if it makes them high). A few stray dogs sitting idly (quite like us mortals; and the similarities don't end here), and a cricket which is too loud for it's tinyness. The moon has been an old faithful in the quiet night sky. It has tried to be quite glamorous in the past few days, but no matter what it tries, it is still as pretty. And as I sit I think of all the people I know, and how I am a bit of every one of them. I realise these aren't the times to hold grudges. (except the really big ones :P). But these are the times to let life savour each moment of enjoyment; be it sitting quietly doing nothing, or painstakingly taking classnotes in what looks like unknown scripts, or delivering series of obnoxious jokes. These are the times to also gracefully deal with the moments that may not be as good. But there's no point in holding petty feelings. They make us small, and undermine the inherent goodness in life. They eat us from within, narrowing our minds so much that we can hardly see beyond what goes on in it.

On 'Friends'. (The really great one)

2011-03-13T11:21:00.001+05:30

This post has been long due. I wouldn't do justice to my beliefs if I didn't write on this one. I'm not too much of a K-serial person. I don't enjoy the camera taking the same scene from different angles with background score that sounds like some heavenly fall of a steel bowl when a fellow is in some mess. Plus their numerous marriages aren't like Ross's. Therefore when a fellow once categorised FRIENDS as a serial, I thanked the bloke above that I am not to pally with this mortal.

The sitcom has been so well woven into my life that I now try to find out the Ross, the Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Joey and Phoebe in every group I wriggle into. And you might laugh at me (for all I care) but when there's some problematic situation that I've got myself into, I often think of how the Friends peeps would react. It does provide me with a reasonable solution. Whether the other party is going to respond to it properly is a different issue altogether. It's not that the sitcom is perfect or the people in it. But that's what makes them so charming and real. It made me realise that in life, in several situations, if we had that background laughter being played while we were being the victim of some odd situation, we'd realise how funny certain things really are. And let's face it. Life is quite funny anyway.

So here's to the sitcom I'm partial towards. It's not that I don't enjoy other shows. (How I met your mother is beautifully made) but I am just an insignificant mortal who can't control her partialities towards the one sitcom that taught her a lot in life. (however cheesy this might sound).

On Insignificance

2011-03-12T02:08:00.002+05:30

As I watched the waters engulf bits and pieces of Japan forever, I wondered where we all stand. It gives the same feeling that one gets when she sees the skies. The sheer grandeur makes one realise the insignificance of our little lives in the cosmic world. It obviously has greater things in mind, therefore while the earth on its way towards its usual spin suddenly trips, it takes with it the lives of people in a jiffy, like a trot of a small man that accidentally kills a few ants.

The cosmos didn't give us fellows much power, neither does it care much. We fellows learnt a few tricks during the evolution and think that we are the smartest of the lot. As our heads grew big our ideas shrank and it revolved around the superiority of mankind upon the rest of the creatures, and then the superiorty of man over man. But let's face it, even if that Darwininan monkey is laughing at our present volatile condition, I wouldn't trade places with it. I'm almost content with my present comfort, hoping to gather some more. I'm not sure if I shall ever be happy with everything I have, but then, that's what human nature is like I suppose. I'm more or less content.

But somewhere down the line, however important and magnanimous our evolution might appear to be, we are still a rtiny speck in the cosmic world, that lives for only a fraction of time before getting back to dust. It is probably this realisation of our insignificance in this larger universe that makes one create a God to symbolise hope and power of the great great unknown. We are still the little selfish creatures that swarm around the surface of the earth, and only a little tripping of the earth, some burps and hiccups is all that it takes to make us realise how insignificant we really are.

On Intense fellows

2011-03-05T00:15:00.000+05:30

I've always wanted to write something so poignantly sad that people would feel that lump in their throat right from the first sentence they read of mine, and they'd cry till their eyes were all weird and puffy. But the little skill I have lacks in this regard. I've wanted to write about the friends I never had, the weight that was never mine, and the places I've left behind. But whenever I plan to whine about something, trying to bring out the sentimental best in me so that people read and comment 'this fellow is quite intense', something goes awry. I think of all the chums I have for rea and all the good fortunes that have been pouring upon me. Whenever I feel quite down and out that I haven't visited school for long, I have this feeling that the best thing I can do for my school is to carry forward its principles. So you see, these feelings get in the way of whining.

And this is when I realise. It takes too much of sadness to be recognised as a very intense fellow. Sadly, my contentment with the world gets in the way.

On Self (because it's a topic I like)

2011-02-19T18:31:00.002+05:30

A fellow mortal asked me to write about myself. I pointed out that that's what I always do because I'm such a narcissist. Fellow mortal still insisted. And I thought about it. And I can come up with nothing. Well, almost. Err, no. Quite a bit.

I mean, I am a motley idea of all the movie or literary characters I like. What I present to another is mostly what an ideal me should have been. A bit of real me here and there manages to wriggle into the idea, which of course makes the scenario less than perfect. I crack obnoxious jokes bordering on obscenity. Though I consider them to be crap put into words in various forms, I whole-heartedly enjoy them while at it.

I wish to appear to be all strong willed and intellectual but I cry each time, when Shahrukh Khan dies in Kal Ho Naa Ho, or when Amitabh and Jaya sing the last song in Abhimaan. I also cry during the last scene of You've Got Mail because, well, what the heck, it has Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. And I cry the most during the last episode of Friends, and to recover from the trauma, I see the first episode of season 1 right after that. Obviously I end up watching the 10 seasons all over again, and the cycle continues. And I don't see an end to it. Not that I want to see an end.

I also like to dramatise situations to give to it a touch of glamour. I often end up making it seem even more boring, as some of my friends are likely to think. What the heck, I am not a newspaper reporter, and to think of it, they exaggerate in a worse manner. When I was in school, I had the negative idea that I am a terrible speaker when it came to talking on something remotely substantial, may be because I imagined judgemental eyes lurking in every corner. College has somewhat shed that inhibition. So now I have qualified from terrible to the coveted position of merely being bad, and I've made peace with it.

I enjoy writing but more than anything else I enjoy writing about my perceptions, my ideas and mostly myself. I have never come across a person so deeply involved in the study of self. I don't enjoy drinking because it somewhat makes me want to vomit and give acidity that isn't good for neighbours. Plus it makes me feel giddy but does not induce me to do things that I wouldn't have done if I were not alcoholically charged. I don't like to smoke either. May be because my braces won't allow me to hold a cigarette comfortably. And anyway I can't do the sexy-chick-with-a-black-cigarette-in-hand thingy. I'll come across as a freaky-adolescent-trying-but-failing-to-act-over-matured. And this won't be cool.

I personally dislike Hyper-hormonal-I-shall-smother-you-with-love PDA but enjoy watching them while people are at it. I am also bugged by people who criticise others on the basis of looks. Makes me feel embarrassed.

And if I go on rambling anymore, I myself shall get bored.

Amen.

The usual pre-examination-blues post

2011-02-11T10:32:00.002+05:30

I don't see any purpose of examinations. Knowledge is too profound to be put on paper and assigned marks on it's side. I mean, And if the purpose is to test one's knowledge anyway, they might as well have questions testing our wisdom, err, regarding hormonal surge of a person if an attractive fellow winks at her, or the typical pre- Valentine's Day 'she loves me she loves me not' dilemna. Now these are real questions that has bothered the minds of fellows at some point of time or the other.

What are we to do with the evolution of capitalism and the likes anyway? As far as I can see, capitalism hasn't evolved much for us. We are still digging too deep into the pocket with a hole to come out with some moolah, and for the ones who have the the disadvantage of being entangled into a 'forever a single-partner genuinely committed' relationship, most haven't successfully enslaved the other for some marginal monetary profit here and there. Nevertheless, fellows are hell-bent on making us what are supposedly considered to be intellectual, and we shall always be questioned with great gusto on the greater social scenario and all that confusion that each man created before ultimately hitting the bucket: I mean, we human fellows aren't ever happy with the eat-drink-hunt-sleep-reproduce kind of a routine and thus we have to study history for all the mess they created and we are creating now, simply because we high and mighty mortals don't like the things as they are. Ever.

But my ramblings isn't ever going to work. The desire to test knowledge shall continue, with the residue of a sense of being hit at the posterior with a very intellectual kick of mankind, forever.

Happy Year-End to all folks.

2010-12-19T12:33:00.004+05:30

We all make terrible New Years' Resolutions. Not the type which are shown in the movie where you neatly write down point-by-point as to what you should do, and inevitably it has one point that deals with weight. (I am not going to dwell into that forbidden territory. Pricks me right at the bottom of my small small heart). But one makes a mental note of some of the important things that the fresh year shall induce you to do. All fair and good. But the list remains more or less unchecked even at the end of the year. So I decided to get rid of that lousy habit once and for all. It's so much better to recall all the good things that you've unexpectedly done, than to recall all the things that you were supposed to do and you haven't. (One always should voluntarily forget all the lousy stuff of the year. Works well with the happy hormones and all that, you know). To hell with expectations. One can't deal with those of the people around you, let alone those that one voluntarily shoves into the already burdened mind.

So cheers to all the good thoughts. May you enjoy the last days of the year like you've never enjoyed before. And if things don't work out fine, then you always have the option of being sad and lousy. :D

On the larger picture.

2010-12-12T10:56:00.006+05:30

I've shifted homes within the city quite often. In my earliest days when I'd generally spend my time staring, crying and pooping, I lived in a place where Job Charnock first landed when he came to this side of the world. It was a locality of composite people: fallen aristocracies still clinging half- heartedly to older glories, and families stepping on to the middle- class ladder.

I then shifted to a nearby locality which stands out for it's cultural diversity. There's the families of respected professionals, a predominantly Christian setting with a fair amount of Muslim population and a respectable number of Jewish families as well. This is where my grandparents lived and I believe that their liberal outlook suited the locality well.

Then unfortunately from the heart of the city I had to shift to what I thought then was a concrete jungle adjacent to Kolkata. However, Salt lake is now quite the hub of all things that's quite advanced in the city, being new and organised. I used to live in government quarters and my neighbourhood was pretty much egalitarian, and even if ostensibly, they weren't too conservative. After staying there for nearly thirteen years and making friends that would last a lifetime and more, I shifted to a new place about nine months ago.

My neighbourhood now is pretty interesting. Neighbours wanting to borrow stuff firstly asks if they've ever been contaminated by meat or not. They apologetically say that they are without a maid, unfortunately because they obviously had to get rid of the previous one because she made the mistake of being born as a Muslim. I remember, when my grandparents used to live in this same place (after they had shifted from Central Kolkata), I went to a birthday party. We were all around 10 years old, and a girl innocently asked me 'what are you?' I was to young for some good sarcasm and hence I was just plainly wondering whether she wanted to ask me if I were a girl or a boy. Of course she clarified, wanting to know not my gender (thankfully she figured that out herself. Smart kid.) but my caste. She seemed satisfied with my answer.

And I wonder. All the glorified things about the country sometimes seem like such a big sham. We aren't really a nation and yet we expect everyone to have nationalistic feelings. My new locality has been quite different from all the apparently progressive localities in Kolkata I've lived in. And yet I have this uneasy feeling that this is closer to reality.

Of momentary observations.

2010-10-09T01:41:00.006+05:30

It's that time of the year when the weather suddenly starts to change it's mood. As I tucked myself under a warm sheet as it rained quietly outside, I thought of all the charming thoughts that might be coming to a person who has been bestowed with the power to write magic. Those that touches the heart more than the common sense. At times I regret my inability to make things seem more beautiful than they are. It's probably my perception of reality that makes me incapable of doing so myself. I'm not a very honest person when it comes to exaggerations. But somehow writing of feelings that are 'magical' renders to me a sense of betraying my own standards of honesty, however shifty that might be.

It rained outside. The streets were almost empty except for a bus or two speeding by. The wind was so cold that it was hard to imagine that I was all messily sweaty only a few days ago. The windows of most of the houses stayed close. There was no extraordinary sway of the trees. Just a passive tolerance of the rain, as if it didn't bother them at all. As I observed rather nonchalantly I thought of the hopeless romantics who were thinking of their lovers, the creative fellow writing that one poem that would give these moments a timeless beauty, the sad man down the road being nostalgic about times lost and faded. I thought of how the music lover would listen to that one tune that befits the moment according to his tastes, I thought of people's passions, of which I've read so much.

Passion seems to evade me as I nudge my mind to remain pragmatic all the time. As I heard the drizzle, I realised that I don't know what my favourite song is like.

There was a sense of regret in me as I went off to sleep. It was just another beautiful day-end, whose larger-than-reality magical elements remained beyond me.

very intellectual traits of very intellectual people.

2010-09-17T12:08:00.003+05:30

Ever since our glorious school days, I laughed at my sister for choosing the science stream as she'd have to study very very complicated things while I'd laugh away with my paltry humanities syllabus. I was wrong. And the Gods have thus been punishing me with extra classes almost everyday. Hence the brief sabbatical from blogging. However all my pedagogic activities have not been wasted. Considering I have a crooked sense of observation, I put it to good use.

Being in a college that is famous for its intellectual hyper-activity helps, though often the immediate experience is ghastly and very suicide-inducing. I've begun to observe certain traits that are akin to all wannabe-intellectuals (irrespective of colleges. All's said and done, I'm totally smitten by the place I'm in :p)

When it comes to choice of movies, extremities help. You can get away with an I-am-above-all-this-crap air when you claim your favourite movies to be Oscar winning dramas/Obscure foreign movies and extreme Tollywood potboilers that no sane person can take seriously. It's only when you choose too many romantic comedies and too many movies that star Shahrukh Khan (which does not include Swades) that your intellectuality is questioned.

This idea trickles down to books as well. No one is ever going to listen to me if I say that Chetan Bhagat is the most intellectual author in India, for if nothing else he raked in a huge margin of profit through his paperback series. I've always believed that self help is the best help, and since this guy who looks like a fat version of Rahul Gandhi has helped himself with the moolah pretty generously, he must be admired. Also, reading unfinished works of dead peeps help in giving one the intellectual aura. With the high level of intellectual development that many have very laboriously indulged in, one isn't even an intellectual enough if he has just read 1984 and not Orwell's Critical Essays (or something like that.)

However when it comes to indulging in alcohol with gusto, the peeps who want to be vague rather forcefully (read: pseudo-intellectuals) go high too quickly, and talk about it too much, and at some point of time talk about why they've downed a few gulps, and in more than one instance, I've heard of one excuse that have been to feel the pulse of Pink Floyd more effectively. (However, being a teetotaler, I shall humbly no more comment on other people's alcoholic sojourns. May the Gods bless them with a thirstier stomach).

There are much more things of course but this shall have to suffice as the State Electricity Board has decided to go for a power-cut spree right now. *UPS beeps*. :|

How to write depressing poetry:

2010-08-03T13:55:00.000+05:30

I have recently discovered that it is very easy to write bad emo poetry. All one has to do is to throw in all the dark words in a sentence, use all possible difficult words in one's own dictionary. The more the piece esoteric and complex, the better the quality of dark poetries of neurotic teenagers. From my perspective, it goes something like this:

The creepy night wishes away my time
Desire burns, churning blood into coagulated blobs.
Screams of laughter pierces through the night sky.
The kites swoosh across the screen of dark heaven,
seeking prey amidst the desolate streets
that are strewn with the remnants of violent desire.
The final desire of a lone person,
As her last futile attempts at emo-poetry
kills the very soul of its readers.

Don't kill me. :| I am bored. :|

On a serious note

2010-07-31T10:04:00.000+05:30

It is at strange times and circumstances that certain nuances of life hits one hard, while the unassuming innocent soul is least likely to expect a profound thought.

We mortal beings are habituated with tolerating people. Boy, we even tolerate the ones who leaves a sense of why-didn't-i-die-before-i-had-to-confront-this-being. But then even they are an inevitable part of our lives. Without them we'd never learn to value the rest of the folks. It's strange to meet varied nature of people with a paradoxical like-mindedness. At times, specially when exams are over and you have idle thoughts to spare, you'd realise with a faint smile, the affection of a person who likes you for who you really are, and not how your appearance makes you to be. The friends who may not boast of an undying bond forever and after, but provide some really good memories for the future, some unadulterated fun for the present, and some simple things to learn about the tricks of life and times, (that does include a plethora of corny jokes and other forms of jargon). The friend whose quiet gestures from a far off city gives you the confidence that you often lack: a consequence of being in the presence of super-man like people, with super intelligence and super appeal, (minus the inside-out mode of sense of fashion, if you know what I mean). This quiet confidence nudges you along this world full of extraordinary people, making you realise that it is nowadays often so extraordinary to be just another ordinary person. Somehow the idea makes me rather content. I am amidst good people.

P.S: I had philosophy examination today. That might explain what seems inexplicable in this note.

Essay on Powercut and very hot people.

2010-06-26T20:01:00.008+05:30

The original post is here: http://unbound-forever.blogspot.com/2010/04/essay-on-powercuts-and-very-hot-people.html

This is a very serious essay on powercut. During powercuts the lights go off. Usually they happen when Kolkata Knight Riders are playing decently. Loser people call up other loser people during this time. Naughty naughty people enjoy powercuts, you know why. Though I think they can switch off the lights when they want to anyway. But I guess all the other folks in the house will laugh then. Us silly Indians. We always like to do naughty naughty things in the dark. Like taking money as bribes. We like to take them from under the table while we wear pure white dresses to show off our pristine purity. You see, it's the system that has made us like this. We really don't want to be so naughty.

Hopeless going- to- be- twenty girls play during powercuts. They take the candle and sing Noorie Noorie. It is really funny but unfortunately the people around these girls don't have a sense of humour. You see, we are serious people.

Babies cry when it is dark. It's another issue that they cry even when there is light.. Screaming babies aren't childplay to most gonna-be-twenties. They feel very scared and wish that a handsome boy was nearby. But since they are hopeless they don't have handsome boys nearby.

These hopeless girls also feel scared that their good grandparents up with God are going to visit them in the dark. They are usually scared of ghosts and so they call up other people and scare them too. Hopeless gonna-be-twenties are stupid. They don't know that ghosts don't waste time on boring people.

It is also the time when men with salivating tongues stare at poor lonely girl in the dark. These men like to stare. They also like to comment and whistle. They don't whistle very nicely. I can whistle better than them and may be I should teach them someday. My school has taught me that whatever I do, I should do well. May be they did not learn anything in school. I feel sorry for them. May be they should go to school. When I grow up I shall do a big charity show where I will gather money for poor men who can't behave.

The powercuts switch off the fan too. This is summer. We all feel very hot. Even our school principal looks hot in summer. For we all sweat and the temperature is very high. Pretty girls can't untie their hair to show how pretty she looks in summer. The sweat and oil makes the hair look like a rope. That isn't pretty. But as my father says, pretty girls look pretty all the time. And so they look pretty all the time.

It is very hot now too. The lights and fans have just regained consciousness so I am going to publish this post. For all those who've read beyond the first line, thank you. You have proven that you have immense patience. May you get married soon

Tiger tiger burning bright

2010-06-18T19:20:00.003+05:30

They came, they growled, they conquered...(or I think they rather went back to sleep). Or at least that’s how tigers behaved in the zoos. Tigers aren’t really just an entertainment in the behind the cages. They mean a lot more to the nation.

They inspired the famous Tiger striped trousers that heroines of the nineties have worn with élan, yellow trousers clinging to areas that today’s lingo will categorise as plus size while they were at their famous jhatkas and the matkas. Paired with yellow shirt and high boots, they completed the picture of an odd amalgamation of western casual culture and a typical sense of Over The Top (OTT) tendencies in tinsel town fashion. Hero in red jacket, wavy hair and macho sun-glasses would complete the picture. Without tigers, most cars in India would have had a vacant look. I mean, most people familiar with Indian roads is bound to see a car that ha a rather ferocious Big Cat perched at its rear, sitting in a regally formidable position. They usually have a scowl on their faces instead of a look of regal growls that are so famous in the back of Lorries and public buses. Their ferocious growling expression is usually accompanied by the word ‘danger’ in various innovative spellings and a couple of flags of the nation proudly proclaiming how great India is.

These beasts are so revered in our country that anything or anyone that does the country proud in a rather ferocious don’t-mess-with-me kind of a way gets the tiger tag. And thus Sharmila Tagore has a husband whom the nation fondly calls Tiger. Talking of the celebrity world, to many people, Rahul Roy is famous as the actor who metamorphosed into a tiger by night, prowling here and there (for some reason that I forgot.). Amitabh Bachchan’s character in the movie Hum was called Tiger. However tacky the name sounded, it kind of suited his character of macho guy working for local goonda and yet being the saviour of his brothers and finally the movie, beat up all the baddies at one go. I also wonder how Shehnaz Hussain would have survived for so long if she didn’t try to imitate the looks of a tiger, with all the lion kind of a head thrown in to add more glamour if that was ever possible. She would have shrivelled to something not so blatantly eye- catching, if you know what I mean. But now every person who has seen her once will probably remember her for the rest of his life, even if he has no clue about her products.

SO, to think of it, tigers are associated with the country more deeply than scientific datas will ever be able to prove. It is a different issue that it has inspired several of the nation’s fashion faux pas of yesteryears. But the fact remains that it is intertwined with the nation’s life. Simply put, saving them would do good, because their loss shall be deeply felt by many.

On being twenty

2010-05-17T12:21:00.002+05:30

And so God took six days to create everything that he had to create. On the seventh day he was very peaceful. He sat with a good ol' bottle of beer at the beach and patted his belly for all the good job that he did. millions of years later as he still was working on his muse called creating 'people' particularly for this country which he definitely likes to fill with a lot of that kind, he had some trash. As a form of divine dustbin he created me. And I survive as the last of its kind.

I shall turn 20 tomorrow and with divine blessings I shall carry with me to my next year some obnoxious bouts of fever. Hail Birthday spirit.

I shall be losing my teenagehood or whatever that is, though I still look like I can pass off as a pre- adolescent whiny kid. From tomorrow onwards I shall officially lose my right to throw tantrums that can be simply passed off with a remark 'it's her age'. I am now officially supposed to act grown-up like, answer politely to questions like 'why are you so thin' and 'why do you study so much' instead of answering with some badly construed sarcasm. Anyway sarcasm doesn't pay off anymore. Nowadays when I reply to these questions by saying that I am dieting/because I wan't to be the Ultimate Geek, people actually take me seriously.

Now that I am getting out of the so called formative ages, I am suposed to take stuff around the world very seriously. If I claim that the greatest philosophers on earth have been P. G. Wodehouse, Jerome K. Jerome, Calvin and Hobbes and Chandler Muriel Bing, then I shall have to be prepared for the divine kick in the posterior for committing a sin by omitting Marx and the likes. I shall have to hide my optimism in almost everything with a cynical realism about the world where I comment on almost everything with a i-know-about-this nod and continue with a how-the-world-is-changing kind of a sigh. And yeah the vague look to almost all questions thrown at me willl definitely have to go.

And so I shall enter a new decade of my life. And I shall survive.

P.S: None of these views on changing myself are actually going to be true. I shall bother about it when I am 90 and philosophical.

This has been dedicated to Chandrayee, Nibedita, Somrwita, Shreya, Tina and Sayantani. Without you, cribbing wouldn't have been so fun.

My Legendary Idleness.

2010-05-06T08:25:00.002+05:30

It is ironical that when I check the juvenile list that I made when I was not yet 18, as to what i should do when I gain the official adulthood, little did I realise that almost all of those targets were left incomplete even two years after I did become 18. I lack a sense of wildness that I would have found rather funny. I mean, what's the wildest thing I have ever done? probably walk in the stadium at 4 am in the morning. But then that's what old men do who have with them the company of arthiritis and gout. And boy I don't even have that.

Probably the desire to do something weird springs up from extreme boredom regarding what one already does, or does not. I sleep so much that it has been a long time since I saw what morning looked like. I woke up today at 5 only because I had to and I intend to compensate that by sleeping the next twelve hours to glory.

My sense of boredom is unique in the sense that it makes the world around me timeless, like those age old classic movies. I can sit with it for hours and little do I realise when morning turns into dusk. It is so exquisitely beautiful that I can weave it's magic even in my writing, propagating and making others understand the very essence of boredom as they read. Enjoy dear folks.

Yet another cynical observation

2010-04-28T20:25:00.004+05:30

The beauty of unrequitted love lies in the fact that there remains hope. The irony lies in the fact that once the love is 'achieved', hope is dampened, and love fizzles out without much grace.

Most of the popular love stories are tragic. Or else they 'happily end' when cute boy finally gets his pretty lass. Probably they allude to the idea that here's where happiness ends, and hence a happy ending. For all the brawls and irritation that follows makes not a rosy picture. The love does not grow, only takes a giant plunge rather disgracefully and ends with a irritating hangover. I have this feeling that Devdas would never have been so drunkenly in love had he got his Paro. Probably he would have been deliriously joyous at first, pride pumped up to his neck or something. But he wouldn't have been screeching the name of his lady love all the time perhaps. (Just a thought. All the novel lovers need not prepare to strangle me to death if you think otherwise.)

And so love is achieved, like some chewing gum a kid hankers for, to be spitted out with much obnoxious residue.

Thankfully, there are exceptions in plenty, and even my cynicism can't dampen the prospects of some good ol' love stories. :D

Essay on Powercuts and very hot people.

2010-04-10T22:32:00.003+05:30

This is a very serious essay on powercut. During powercuts the lights go off. Usually they happen when Kolkata Knight Riders are playing decently. All the loser people call up other loser people during this time. Naughty naughty people enjoy powercuts, you know why. Though I think they can switch off the lights when they want to anyway. But I guess all the other folks in the house will laugh then. Us silly Indians. We always like to do naughty naughty things in the dark. Like taking money as bribes. We like to take them from under the table while we wear pure white dresses to show off our pristine purity. You see, it's the system that has made us like this. We really don't wantb to be so naughty.

Hopeless going- to- be- twenty girls play during powercuts. They take the candle and sing Noorie Noorie. It is really funny but unfortunately the people around these girls don't have a sense of humour. You see, we are serious people.

Babies cry when it is dark. It's another issue that they cry even when there is light, or bright light. The screams of these toddlers aren't childplay to most gonna-be-twenties. They feel very very scared and wish that a handsome boy was nearby. But since they are hopeless they don't have handsome boys nearby.

These hopeless girls also feel scared that their good grandparents up with God are going to visit them when it is dark. They are usually scared and thinks ghosts are going to come, and so they call up other people and scare them too. Hopeless gonna-be-twenties are stupid. They don't know that ghosts don't waste time on boring people.

It is also the time when men with salivating tongues stare at poor lonely girl in the dark. These men like to stare. They also like to comment and whistle. They don't whistle very nicely. I can whistle better than them and may be I should teach them someday. My school has taught me that whatever I do, I should do well. May be they did not learn anything in school. Poor men. I feel sorry for them. May be they should go to school. When I grow up I shall do a big big charity show where I will gather money for poor men who can't behave.

The powercuts switch off the fan too. This is summer. We all feel very very hot. Even our school principal looks hot in summer. For we all sweat and the temperature is very very high. Pretty girls can't untie their hair to show how pretty she looks in summer. The sweat and oil makes the hair look like a rope. That isn't pretty. But as my father says, pretty girls look pretty all the time. And so they look pretty all the time.

it is very hot now too. The lights and fans have just regained consciousness so I am going to publish this post. For all those who've read beyong the first two lines, Thank you. You have successfully proven that you have immense patience. May you get married soon.

I've got exams coming up. hence a post.

2010-03-21T14:02:00.000+05:30

Humans are social beings. So for the utopian cause of social welfare, we say things we really don’t mean. Such has been the case for me in recent times. Often what I say, isn’t really what I mean to say. Here are some of the horrid examples:

Fellow cruel social animal: You are so thin.
Me: I know (You opened my eyes sweetheart. I have those funny mirrors at home that make the thin look fat and… Oh look at those adipose on you)

Dentist: you’re braces will have to be kept for a longer time.
Me: No problem. (Without the braces I was the ugliest. With them I am uglier. Without them I shall be plain ugly. No problem. With them or without them I shall remain in some state of ugliness anyway)

Certain fellow classmates: You always study.
Me: I study adequately; I surmise (And if you think not studying is cool, go get a dip into an ice berg.)

To- be- Intellectuals: (Looking at a hot girl) “Karl Marx has said…”
Me: *Vague look*. (If you want to be an intellectual, let’s start with the basics sweetheart. Cut the biogas emitted from your system. In brief, cut the crap, save mankind. Being an intellectual does not imply that you’ll have to flaunt your intellectuality on every mundane occasion. That insults the true intellectuals fellows out there ruling the world. Digest THAT.)

As for many other questions that are thrown at me, the answers in my mind are definitely censored stuff. By the way this does not imply that I don’t fall prey to asking these questions to others myself. :D

P.S: If this has hurt the sentiments of certain fellow beings, let me tell you that I did not intend to, and I can't help if you are as touchy as me :| go, enjoy being lousy.

Twisted Logic. (Ignore post)

2010-02-22T11:54:00.003+05:30

Thomas Robert Malthus had said that often natural calamity strikes a blow upon mankind to level population with the food of the world. Thus if there is one apple pie that can at most be shared amongst five fellows, and there are 10 beings, the remaining five may be struck by some natural calamity to bring down the number of people to five. If we broaden the spectrum, homicides of fellow human citizen fall into the same category of calamity, human induced. So with every premature death, the population balance is being sought to level.

If there is food for twenty. And there are forty people; Darwinian Theory of survival of the fittest comes to the rescue. The fittest gets the food. The fittest implies the one with an advantageous position or the one who is cunning. And thus we get the haves and the have nots, when population is not equal to the amount of resources in the world. Justice apparently denied as the lord calls for equality for his people, the have nots become vengeful. And thus we have cases of homicide. Often the victims are not victims of any personal vendetta. They are the victims of the privileges that some people get and some people are denied. To put it in a nutshell, they fall under the category of victims of inequality in the society. Like the terrorists’ or extremists’ victims. Erasing inequality from the world is a tough job. Because if you create economic and political equality, (which is very difficult because we folks are greedy and egoistic and hence want to get as much as we can, that may be more than what we need) you still remain with the inequality of the minds and personal preferences. And the only solution to that perhaps is to create clones of only one mind. But that would imply killing off humanity itself, which isn’t beneficial for the development of resources. Thus through homicides, mass or otherwise, one can not level people with resources available, which is perhaps the ultimate aim of the sub conscious. And thus, even without taking into consideration high ideals, killing people is meaningless and unproductive in the long run.

Enough said. It's amazing what a person can do to kill her boredom. And I am still bored. If not even more. :|

on life and death

2010-02-15T11:37:00.003+05:30

We all like to survive basically. Even though we start wailing right from the moment we are born. But it’s not really as drab as that. Kindergartens are fine except for the first few days. You learn to tie your shoes, go to the loo that’s not in your home, learn to share tiffin and learn to detest the bread and banana combination that most Indian parents think is the best.

Then we learn to grow up. We learn to enjoy cribbing about our frustration. Gives us some self- importance. We learn to enjoy the nuances of learning a new life that has got an exciting mix of adulthood and innocence. we leave school as newly branded adults, willing to conquer our whims and fancies. We cherish our outings with friends, the mundane mumbo-jumbo talks usually garnished with silly jokes that the world will definitely not find humorous. We hold onto our dreams strongly, having a strong conviction that we’ll make them come true someday. And then one fine morning we just might die. To live life on one’s own terms we need time. But that might not happen. Life is as simple as that.

The terrorist attacks all over have bothered me. I am not that clear minded or idealistic to properly and charismatically explain that I want them to be stopped for the sake of humanity or world peace. I want them to stop for a selfish reason. They affect and scare me. And I don’t like this feeling.

Essay on Valentine's Day

2010-02-14T14:19:00.001+05:30

Today is St. Valentine’s happy birthday. Happy Birthday saint. It was a month ago. But for us it is today. I don’t know why. Today little little boys and girls go around with other little little boys and girls. They hold hands, wear pink and giggle. They also buy a lot from their pocket money. They usually like pink teddy bears. Today they do naughty naughty things. And the moral police have fun too, even if they don’t do naughty naughty things. The world today looks beautiful, like a big pink cake. Today the shops have hearts. The balloon ones that go with a bang when pricked. Just a week before this auspicious day many queue up to get their love of their lives. They prepare a list ad whoever comes off fast, they get it. It is very simple. Like shopping. And the shopped product comes in a pretty baggage too. All red and pink. And they hold their hearts. The balloon ones that go with a bang when pricked. The greeting cards’ market comes up with many many cards for this special occasion. They have heart chocolates that are so delicious. Everyone does not buy them. They get them as gifts from their lovers who spend a lot of money. We all have big hearts today. The balloon ones that go bang when pricked.

Them Nobel Fellas

2010-02-10T13:10:00.006+05:30

(I had written this ages ago. Found it lying idle and posted it thus. :| )

The beloved pet dogs of every house begins to play hide and seek, with more of the hide part underneath the bed, as the rich nooks and corners of the country light (and sound) up in expensive fireworks. The news, for which we were waiting ever since independence, behaving like a scorned lover ever since Gandhi was given a miss and only simmering a bit when Mother Teresa received the prize, has finally come. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has finally decided to give the Nobel Peace Prize collectively to some Indian celebrities. I browsed through the list through my tear bedimmed eyes. With patriotism brimming, I saluted the recipients. They were:

Rabri Devi: Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with the rest for maximum development in Bihar, for the first work in total development is deconstruction of what existed, to be built anew, and she has done the part of deconstruction mighty well. Award given also for having the stamina to be the power-wife in a male dominated society. Early 2009 data suggests that she is the proud owner of 60 holy cows and 36 calves (by now they may have proliferated their brood) and thus is a symbol of hope to all the farmers of India- join politics and there’s no more the need for gulping all the pesticides. Her indefatigable spirit is marked by her continuation of whatever she does and did even though the mean citizens and judiciary all conspired against her and filed corruption charges. But she rose from the ashes during each low and proved her might by continuing to be exactly as she was. She not only gives hope to the farmers but is a great source of impetus for people who do not find mere embezzlement of money a corrupt deed. All hail.

Rakhi Sawant: Given the Noble Peace Prize for being able to retain the traditional Indian culture amidst this kali age of social mayhem, thus giving hope to people who fear that doomsday of tradition has arrived. She has got engaged in the traditional form of Swayamvar and got pretty pretty men to woo her. This also is a victory of feminism or female chauvinism or whatever it is called. She is also the ‘Bharatiya Nari’ who is so committed to her social work that for the sake of public exposure, she is on television 24*7. Oh dear, the pain she takes to tame us ruthless destroyers of social norms. She’s the mother goddess who shall save the straying Indians and place them back on the traditional bandwagon. Bless her holy pure heart. A peace prize has been announced for her, which shall be telecast along with her every time she’s on screen. That will give an extra fillip to the unruly Indian public so that they behave more traditionally from the next time.

Mayavati: Women empowerment personified, she has brought back the ancient culture of creating portraits and statues for self aggrandisement. Her workmanship spirit is marked by the presence of a small bag being held by her in every statue. She gives more importance to ideological empowerment than mere economic progress and has thus spent around Rs 2000 crore to built statues of the mighty lady herself, and a few others to uplift the spirit of the downtrodden. Like Rabri Devi she has given hope to many that behind every dark cloud there is a silver lining, which may incidentally be Indian politics. The statues and gardens 400 years later shall become what Taj Mahal has become to us. Many cynics criticise her but one must not forget that she has given hope, apart from the fact that she has created a few more parks for the lovers, a few more statues for the crows to whitewash away to glory and a few more monuments that our descendants shall look up to in amazement, wondering what was going on.

Varun Gandhi: he managed to go the ground breaking way. Such vehement claims of protecting one’s people hardly come by. He was the self-proclaimed messiah of the Pilibhit people. Proving to be an all time macho man, he claimed to slice off all hands that would rise against his people, true Rajnikanth style. He is the great hero, the angry young man who can only be mellowed by Ma. Peace prize goes to him for proclaiming to protect his people from all handy evil, as well as for giving hope, with all his aggression, that ‘yes he can’ achieve what he has proclaimed.

Rajnikanth: It’s a man! It’s a superhero! No, it’s Rajnikanth! To the man who can beat a thousand villains blue with just a single wink, he isn’t merely the macho man. He’s almost superhuman. Rajnikanth does not have a fanfare. He is a religion and his fans are the worshippers. His golden hair in the movie Shivaji might have been one of the most absurd fashion faux pas in filmy history, but then, whatever he touches becomes a cult, even if it’s a blonde wig. Rajnikanth religion transcends class division. Both the haves and the have nots worship him with equal fervour. To them, he is the Absolute, his dialogues their gospel. He had definitely deserved a Nobel for his effortless triumph at class assimilation, and he got it.

Palaniappan Chidambaram: Nobel Prize given strictly for good reflex action and presence of mind. As the Great Boot of Jarnail Singh was being passionately hurled towards him with Indian precision, he smiled. He dodged his head in a calm manner like when a person grooves to good music, while the boot passed like a lost comet. And he smiled. As Jarnail Singh’s fierce eyes were attempting to pierce him, he smiled. As the reporter was being taken out of the room, he asked people to hand him gently, and he smiled. Also, Obama smiles and he got the Award. So P. Chidambaram has been given the award too. Probably also given for having one of the least corrupt images in desi politics.

Uma Bharti: Her conviction towards doing what she aims at is commendable. Like Obama has immortalised the words ‘yes we can’, similarly her ‘ek dhakka aur do’ (give it one more push) won the hearts of hundreds of workers who gleefully pulled down the Babri Masjid, and with it went down religious syncretism, security and a big chunk of beautifully carved history. But then who cares about that. The mighty woman is known for her fiery antics in parliament to give more ‘dhakka’ for the support of her causes. Ah! Where would one find such energy, spirit and such immense lack of lethargy amidst the pantheon of the holy Indian politicians? She gets the Nobel Peace Prize for hope- for the hope that she can retire in peace, satisfied with an award, without making further hullabaloo with her Babri Masjid stunt and the likes. A percentage of the prize may be shared with other bigger leaders Who Must Not Be Named, who were stupid enough to demolish something that was integral to India.

Amar Singh: Prize for being the First friend to the First Family of Bollywood. His dedication towards his friends makes him take painstaking efforts to tolerate all the award functions of the Filmy parivaar. He is the bridge between the real and the reel world and is the ideal exemplar of the ideal friend. Amitabh Bachchan is one lucky man. And now he has unleashed a greater zeal for filmy stuff, showing his acting skills in movies and being bereft of his party folks for good.

Himesh Reshammiya: The proverbial last but not the least; He gets the Nobel for discovering other activities of the nose that we folks of the world were blissfully unaware of. The only works of the nose other than smelling, to us ignorant lay people, were nose digging (which by the way is a subtle art very few could master, or appreciate in public), nose blowing (with lots of sound, and then using the same kerchief for more than a day till every cursed neighbour is compelled to have the same disease), snoring and being nosey for the sake of following the principle of know thy neighbour. But this man could make The Nose sing. Alright, so some people can blow their nose rather tunefully but he actually can make full songs out of it. How did he do it? It’s complicated. Since discovering the nose does not fall under any proper category, he has been placated with a Peace Prize.

And so I come to the end of the list, Kudos to the Audacity of Hope.

Life, Travel and the Race.

2010-02-02T00:17:00.002+05:30

Darwin’s (or Herbert Spencer’s) term ‘survival of the fittest' alludes to a philosophy that transcends generations. This isn’t any essay on Darwinian Theory but something more boring. One has to sweat it out in every sphere of life. Like for example, I was joyfully concentrating on this pretty chick on a bus, listen to a groovy song to fit my rather promiscuous mood, when this pretty pretty boy caught her attention. And lo behold she was hooked onto him. Gender bias I say. Even the girls are hooked onto the boys. In Orkut lingo, ‘no donuts’ for women empowerment.

And so the Fittest wins by rummaging through the survival strategies. As I hop on to the bus after college to spare me the extra pennies that are downright pinched through my pocket if I take an auto rickshaw, I have to do this impromptu nagin dance jig to slither into the maize of sweaty fellow passengers. I stand on the door of the bus, on the threshold of life and death, praying to the God whom I pray to when I am in an extremely strategic position, muttering bribes so that the not-so-benign Almighty spare me the horror of being made into a newspaper headline “Thin girl squeezed to death. Mamata Banerjee blames the CPM, crying conspiracy” or something like that. As I enter the bus finally, Rajnikanth attitude style, I am made to do obscure yogic postures that even Vatsayana and Co. couldn’t dream of, let alone write. Thanks to my extreme lack of volume I eventually squeeze out a seat between two people. Gosh, the things one has to do to do a simple thing as sitting.

And then in the same bus, one might chance upon two fellow women, keenly interested in their (and others’) hyper-motherhood, and their conversations that have a strong and sinister undertone of baby competition. So if Momma in Red Sari says her litter could walk at the age of 1 year, the Momma in Blue attempts to shut her up by citing examples of her little kid’s running, Usain Bolt style. I distinctly remember one such victim of Hyper-Parenting-Syndrome who insisted that her class three kid could spell P for pneumonia when other kids could only blurt A for apple. And so the kids of these are made to run in the race and sweat it like a man, even though the blighted creatures don’t even know how to adjust their own nappies. And since then they fight it out. Man to man and woman to woman. (Man to woman: they don’t usually fight…ahem). They fight it out on the field of education, love life and marriage, divorces and old age, and let’s face it. Even death.

The need for me to hop out of the bus takes a lot of meditation and planning. I see the front door and the back door. Wherever the coast is clear, I try to manoeuvre myself to that side. I have this feeling of struggling against the whole world as I find myself trying to wriggle out of the people hanging from the bus handles. I do my famous obscure yogic postures. Do the slithering nagin dance. And finally I hop out of it. And peace. This reminds me. in the crematoriums, there is usually a big line for the resting-in-peace fellows. The one who could ‘come first’ in the ‘dying examination’ goes in first. Theologically speaking, probably he gets a faster Nirvana. And so the rat race continues. In life as in death.

I proclaim thee nerd and geek

2010-01-31T10:53:00.005+05:30

It’s one of those mornings when I wake up with a pathetic hangover. I drag myself out from the bed with the blanket trailing behind me like some abnormally weird Cinderella robe. The few strands of hair that remains on my head are attempting an unkempt look. But then a proper unkempt look requires a lot of hair for them to get involved with each other. So I have been saved. My eyes look groggy, can do with a lot of sleep. The effects of a pathetic hangover from a boring dinner it seems.

I sit straight, the bed calling me like a desperate lover. I ask myself the highly philosophical and extremely pertinent question, the answer to which should give me the so called key to success; the effect that guide books of similar names and innovative spellings have when you intend to mug up for a hundred marks on the eleventh hour or later. And then realisation dawns upon me. it brings me the rare hues on my cheeks and the sparkles in my eyes even without my contact lenses. It is intoxicating. Like some virulent shot given through my veins that make me plunge back to life from the dead. Studies. Yes, my friends. Gape at me with disgust as much as you want to. I don’t care. I have found the passion in my life. I enjoy studying. Though it takes a lot of free kicks in the posterior to actually make me sit to do so, but once when I am at it, boy, I am at it. I can sit in libraries for hours and I can bunk classes in the process, and it’s not because the librarians are handsome. (They are not and they happen to be my father’s colleague anyway. Rotten luck.) It’s not that my pedagogic exhibitions have been exemplary. But the fact remains that my passion lies in mugging up, and even understanding some of them. Chide me all of you, if you will. But here I proclaim: I like to study. And no amount of mockery shall deter me from doing so. :|

Lovestruck Romeo Part II (Clue: can't think of a title :|)

2010-01-08T13:45:00.002+05:30

Every soul has bit the dust some time or the other. Losing the fluttering heart is one of the easiest things to do, with all the lesson plans elaborately chalked out in so many of the movies. And oh boy, the stringent repercussions are all the more astonishing. I tell you, love and infatuations can make the most stoic person go all weak and wobbly in the knees. With cupid declaring arrow war on many of my friends, I’ve had the chance of some keen scientific observation.

There starts to grow this intense desire to look more decent than before. (Alright I agree that we girls might always have this desire, but then no harm in assigning a cause to it for some people.) The very sight of slightly sentimental movies (barring Jayaprada- Jeetendra ones) render ultimate tear jerking sessions. Sentimental novels become the new Bible, pages often dripping wet by the virtue of human Niagra Falls. Certain songs trigger similar neurotic behaviour. Network failure on behalf of the hapless phone becomes equivalent to some excessively serious embargo brought upon on mankind by Evil Technology and heartless service providers. All of a sudden even the most disastrously sane chick learns a trick or two of acting ultra-girly, while the man’s macho quotient rises real high to a superman like protective manner. Obviously everyone does not have the macho physique but who cares, to those who are blinded by cupid’s aim; every fiery glance towards prospective competitors is like some deadly amreekan missile. And no sane person will ever be able to explain to them that only Rajnikanth can get away with this and how. Every hapless soul of the opposite gender trying to check the object of one’s fascination is, privately in the minds, skilfully loaded with dynamites and blown off into the thin air. Of course such an idea is never expressed in public, where one is the cool dude with at least some iota of attitude.

And then a time may come when the fun of it is lost. Sunsets are no more glorious, riverside never so fresh. And then…. It’s simple. One gets a new object of affection (or for boring souls: rejuvenates the old) :D and thus the romantic and hilarious cycle continues. :P

P.S: Ignore me for the jargon. Got loads of time at home and obviously have got nothing to do. :|

Lovestruck Romeo

2010-01-07T19:30:00.001+05:30

I am to talk about globalisation and the futility of lack of proper negotiations. I think things were pretty decent before. The intellectually inclined Bong would settle for the prestigious Calcutta University tag amidst intellectual talks over a cup of coffee house’s coffee. Then they’d settle for a good old’ job in the city and all that. But now more folks go out of the city to study, and here comes the negotiating skills at play.

If one goes away to a different city leaving his (or her) girl behind (I imply the prized female cow… err… friend; and not daughter. And I vehemently dislike the term girlfraaand for some vague reason.), the bloke will happen to be lightly screwed once he is in the new city. No matter how much the chicks of the new city are famous for their oomph factor; the mind is bound by the fetters of the girl you left behind. This kind of emotional sentiment piled onto the mind by the human psyche is seriously dangerous for the well being of the hapless folk. I mean, you are thrown into the gaga land where chicks are of the more superior kind and you simply do nothing about it.

Phone calls are another subtle prick in the already prickled posterior. What was otherwise glorious days of gaping into the eye of the girl without flinching an eyelid like the Bollywood heroes, is reduced to a few minutes of blabbers over the phone, along with a strong conscience barging in. it reminding one of the massive whole the phone bill is about to create. It then shifts to the internet and by that time, the heart of the lovelorn fellow is too full with grief.: p

And no matter how much filmi one is, it is strictly not possible to communication via pigeon network. Firstly, if a letter sent with the pigeon to an unknown land (unknown for the pigeon that is) the pigeon might get lost. And snail mails are better options. And what else is the hapless pigeon going to do? Whitewash for the sake of expressing the master’s feelings? Nay, Barjatya’s idea is not realistic to be precise.

And thus is the disheartening condition of the lovestruck Romeo marooned in an unknown land. Sustaining this is a different issue :P

To be or not to be :|

2009-12-29T11:59:00.003+05:30

Alright, I am a girl. (And no. this isn’t where I am attempting to prove it). But I don’t really get many things, what girls do. I empathise wholeheartedly when the male species of the earth look absolutely confused because they can’t make the head or tale out of their chic’s behaviour (though I strongly suspect at times they just pretend.) what is with babies and girls? The moment a baby is targeted, some of the girls’ lips will automatically make the I-am-kissable pout. And lo-behold they shall speedily run towards the hapless target. The target shall be captured, brought into arms and showered with weird noisy hugs and the likes, and all the bacteria that entails. I can understand if the nappied chick is one’s relative and all that, but molesting random babies on the road is something that should be blasphemous where human code of conduct is concerned. What if the baby gives you swine flu?

Then there is the Big Soft Toy dilemma. And I just mean the pink teddy bears and the likes. Again these things make people emit weird sounds in the form of gibberish like baby talks, followed by tall claims in public of sleeping with the thing that is blighted because of excessive human pressure. Of all the XY holding people I know most have gifted or has contemplated gifting teddy bears to their louly lasses, obviously with an ulterior make-me-your-bear motive. And even after the cognizance of the fact that it’s very very difficult to keep them clean, they still survive in the hearts of many ladies. And the larger teddies, the better.

That reminds me of the cleanliness fetish. One spec of dust spotted, and most of my kind are at it. To me everything shall ultimately be dust, so let them be. Let us survive in peace amidst what the earth has created instead of trying to clean up the mess. But I tell you, no one shall ever listen to the great philosopher inherent in me till it’s too late. Anyway, this particular cleanliness fetish takes the form of a mania by the time a person has crossed 30 or has become a mother. I wonder, when I shall be 40, staying alone with a cat in a big mansion after robbing off a millionaire, whether I shall be as disorganised as I am now, or not. I do hope so. Lack of accumulated dust makes me feel somewhat lonely. :|

And the final thing. Clothes. We girls are keen on looking pretty. We take at least some effort for that. The smarter lot does not talk about it 24*7, but some of us unfortunately do. Unless we are busy bugging or suspecting the loves of our lives. It usually starts with complimenting the other person on how pretty she looks, even if she does not. Then it’s sheer business. You negotiate on the shops and whereabouts, know every detail you need and if you have the moolah, you buy a better, trendier version of that ASAP. And that’s how females have highly expandable wardrobes. And that’s how life goes.

I can’t claim that I am absolutely baffled by everything that I have written here, barring the first two points which absolutely baffles me to the highest degree.

P.S: For the people who are showing me the flaming red eye, I say that this is mere generalisation. I did not mean to be offensive. I think. :p

Calculate your loser quotient: Christmas Special. (Offer valid if you are bored)

2009-12-25T20:03:00.004+05:30

We human beings are always out there to find out who’s the greater loser than self. Alright I have been generalising here but the fact remains that at least I do it. the basic five types that I know from personal experience are mentioned below. Go ahead, find your quotient if you fall into these groups, and most importantly, if you are bored :D

1. Go to the nearest pretty church, pray for the pretty girl in the corner whom you’ve been eyeing since morning, attempt to talk through an undecipherable mumbo-jumbo language that culminates into disgust of the girl: this is the loser type which has got the potential to become a non-loser. The princess diary makeover type, if you know what I mean.

2. Sleep late into the afternoon, evening comprises of a booze party. Desire to get sloshed gets so high that you can almost plunge into a booze pool if there was one, to end up being deliriously happy or whatever: absolutely lacks any iota of loser quotient.

3. Hanging around with pretty pretty lasses: same as above. I mean, life is all set. You don’t even need tequila shots here to be high, with PYTs around.

4. Hanging around with pals: same as above. At least even if you are fat or anorexic, they are not going to bother much. you can gorge on any amount of plum cakes you want to. This is sheer bliss.

5. Being online, attempting to blog unsuccessfully: you’ve reached the zenith of loser quotient. End of the story. :D

That’s all folks.

Merry Christmas to you all! And have a euphoric New Year :)

lessons learnt from an educational tour

2009-11-30T23:55:00.006+05:30

College trips are these fast and furious things. All I can remember now is a hazy picture of lots of laughter and a lot more of disaster management. I also managed to measure my loser quotient: as the rest of the folks got zonked I watched NDTV.

I also remember the fact that a girl called me cuddly and tried to hug me much to my discomfort. God it’s only the girls, and only the weird ones who can understand that even I am hormonal. What has the Almighty made me into?

An important fact must be noted down: I bargained in Hindi which is merely adulterated Bengali. No wonder I could not reduce the prices much. One of my classmates bargained, claiming that we are students and we need to have our caution money and hence can’t afford to spend so much. I have also realised that mentally I am an aged aunt. I bought two laundry bags for home. Now that’s something only loud aunts and mothers are supposed to do.

Bangladeshi songs are way better than Bollywood. I have danced to it and have sung in my croaky voice without anyone even attempting to kill me. Bangladeshi rappers make Chiranjeevi look like Rock Hudson. (Check out the video here)

Men are good at carrying luggage. May the Almighty churn out their types as long as we female folks carry huge baggage. And that shall be till eternity.

Jodhpur ‘super fast’ express is running to make people nostalgic about the Partition and all that it entailed. One bunk is to be shared by three people, reservation or no reservation. It validates the great Indian philosophy of sharing with a big smile, however fake that may be.

Apart from other typical ages-old rules that are meant to be broken, Jain temples have made it mandatory for people to smoke out there. See last line in poster for confirmation. I'm not sure whether non-smokers are chucked out or not. I survived.

2009-11-13T11:42:00.001+05:30

As I go on updating my blog, my scope of writing diminishes, narrowing down to a small sliver of ideas till I have no more. If I could talk of love and passion, the world around me would embrace my ideas, for these are universal feelings of goodness. But whenever I attempt to write about love, it ends up being simply about the love for me. Every romantic line that I attempt to write seems like some poetic description of an impending fart.

The problem lies perhaps in the colossal love for self, which is so rigid that it won’t permit anyone else within its narrow domain. I don’t have that eye for details in the trees and birds and grass. Only literature that I read comes from the newspapers, I don’t like animals, and I prefer cats to dogs. There is not a single band I am fascinated by, just a few songs that have been with me since ages continue to fascinate me even now. My knowledge hasn’t increased, neither has my world around me by any greater degree. I haven't matured much since ages ago, though at times pretend to be the know-it-all. And as gradually my ideas diminish, and I have ended up making fun of every single thing I am aware of, my enthusiasm for writing shall perhaps cease to exist.

Hmm. On a serious note, not really :D

Yo man! It's d kewl dude

2009-11-06T23:38:00.003+05:30

I have always believed that every big social change gradually creeps in, it’s the icing, the grand finale which is the social revolution. A certain form of malignancy (can also be deemed as entertainement) have been creeping in: the band of ‘cool dudes. It’s only a matter of days till a revolution takes place and they shall rule the world. They are sprouting up in every nook and corner of the city.

1. They wear sunglasses in the dark, occasionally removing it to check out a girl properly. Impractical folks. I have always said that the best way of eyeing a girl without seeming to be vulgar is to look from the corner of the eyes. But no one listens to me.

2. Buttons to the shirt are an extinct fashion statement. Anyone putting them on is clearly making a great fashion faux pas of the highest degree.

3. They have oh-so-godly girlfriends that even make an absolutely normal girl like me salivate. There are plenty of times when I have imagined myself to be this ultra macho girl fighting the hooligans for the sake of protecting the bold and the beautiful.

4. Fluorescent is THE colour. The flashier the better. It’s truly attractive. A flashy disco belt shall put my father’s generation and Mithun Chakroborty to shame. The Disco Dancer cult has returned with reloaded fervour.

5. ‘Yo dude’, pronounced ‘yo dood’ with loads of attitude: possibly followed by a mild pelvic thrust of the Cheeranjeevi type.

6. Their shrill desi citees are absolutely beautiful. I have always tried to master the art myself. Their brains have this automatic nerve centre that directs them to whistle the moment something even remotely looking like a girl passes by. I have this feeling that they do the same, subtly in their mind, when female animals pass by too.

7. They wear these weird and extremely low waist jeans. They have no sense of the gravitational pull and all that it entails, it seems.

8. Their havens are the public transport system. They can cling on any random girl like a stubborn louse, with a vague i-know-nothing look. If the girl scowls, they scowl back as if the girlie scowl has just robbed off their honour as well as that of their forefathers. Anyway perhaps things could have been better if they wore some deodorant.

With these killing looks and attitude, they’ll soon be reigning supreme all over. Bless them, my Lord.

Rocket Science

2009-11-06T09:49:00.002+05:30

Rockets were designed on the model of the unholy connection of human brain and posterior. A slight holy flickr won’t do. The blessed rear must be a raging fireball creating halo around it for the mind to realise that it’s time to do what should be done, or rather what should have been done a long long time ago.

Ideally the great initiator of a mystic metaphoric fireball should be available at the right time. Like whenever a desperate teenager sees the picture of Penelope Cruz, desire does not need any procrastination. The required kick is felt almost instantly. But when it comes to examinations this isn’t the case. I have been waiting for this great kick of a lifetime since the last month and it’s nowhere to be felt or heard. The cause can’t possibly be the lack of a humungous rear as per the Apple Boy Newton, it can be easily deducted that small site of action requires small repercussion; hence a slight hint of a jolt should set me free, prancing away to pedagogic glory. Not that it works only for an examination. I have a class at college after an hour. It takes me a wee bit more than an hour for me to reach college. And I am blogging. At home.

Dear Lord, Throw me the fireballs.

P.S: For the folks who think that I am still a nerd, I curse you religiously on something that should not be mentioned here. :p

P.P.S: plagiarised-soul.blogspot.com: I stole your title. Not that it was yours.

loserville :D

2009-10-20T12:08:00.001+05:30

It was nearly midnight. I was desperately seeking the reason behind a particular message that beeped onto my cell phone. She picked the phone and lo behold another voice pried into our conversation. I was overjoyed. I dialled another number. The recipient was perturbed that so many of us were bugging her and was anxious to know the Big Problem. We did it. May be for the first time in our lives we dealt with a telephone conference properly without making series of bloopers. :|

Four girls conversing at midnight. We had a very scientific discussion on the birds and bees and flowers and whatever. The words spoken were punctuated with giggles that would put any hyena to shame, and so it continued...

That’s the story of four losers, who at an age nearing twenty, in this tech savvy time, managed to conduct telephone conferences on the cell phone for the first time. (The remaining losers weren’t present at that moment) No matter what we’ve achieved in life we have not compromised with our loser quotient. We might crib but loser is what we shall remain and that too with élan. :p

2009-10-13T01:29:00.003+05:30

It’s an hour past midnight; I’d definitely like to do certain things in my life that will make me euphoric, not merely happy. Me being me, my limited pragmatism may lead me to scoff these ideas away in the morning. But as of now, this is what I want.

1. Spend a night at Prinsep. A full moon, words spoken or two, the sound of the river, and a sleepy city.

2. Get onto the roof of the tallest building in city which gives a view of Victoria Memorial, Cathedral and the two bridges on the river. Charming.

3. Stand on a buoy on the river, those round things that are perched up there with an anchor. I've always found them to be fascinating.

4. Whooshing past the city on the bridge across the river, on one of those soft roof cars.

There goes my midnight desires. ;)
Goodnight fellow nocturnals. I didn't have anything better to do.

I want a Nobel Prize too.

2009-10-09T20:55:00.005+05:30

Okay, let’s be pretty direct. I have slogged hard in this life. Mother says that I had to be given the oxygen the moment I was born so life has been tough for me from Day One. And I demand a Nobel Prize. I have done a lot for the society so I should be given one ASAP (as soon as possible)

1. Soon I’ll be roaring away to twenty (I am almost midway) and I have not puffed the cigarettes even once in my life. A normal addict puffs away to glory minimum 10 per day (according to my father’s statistics) and thus suppose I had started at the age of 15, I would be consuming roughly 365*4*10 cigarettes which amounts to 14600 cigarettes. That equals to 14 mg PM (2.5) emitted per cigarette. Which is 14600*14=204400 mg PM (2.5) so basically I have freed the environment of this big a shit. (Don’t say that buying ciggies would have helped the industry as for the Wise, environment is a bigger issue. Huh)

2. I have given emphasis on Orkutting and the likes, and studies equally (well, almost. Never mind) which is a very very difficult thing to do.

3. I am very thin and therefore people who want to be thin, after seeing me, have started admiring their bulges (well, again, almost)

4. I have resorted to blogging and thus have saved the use of paper. I also communicate with my lovers through emails and scraps instead of wasting paper by writing love letters. Saving trees this way. Also I don’t use pigeons as messengers. Yahoo does the job. See how good I am.

5. I don’t screech or scream and call my forefathers at the sight of lizards, cockroaches etc. I follow the policy of live and let live, lizards find my desk a safe haven. A peace prize for this definitely.

6. I attend all my honours classes in college and bunk most of the pass course classes, thus maintaining a very neat balance. Most people bunk both. Also I managed to be in the good books of the teachers at my school most of the time even though we bluffed to escape in between classes to catch a movie, first day second show. A prize for diplomatic negotiation for this one, shared by my diplomatic compatriots.

7. I also watch movies like Main Prem Ki Deewani Hoon and Bewafaa (Google it if you have not heard of these masterpieces) and I can even recall songs and dialogues from these movies a bit. This shows my level of tolerance. Should be awarded for this definitely.

8. I don’t go out of my house much nowadays and therefore that cuts short my travel costs. Thus I am also participating in the Great Austerity Drive with more success than the peeps who are trying to perch on the cattle… err… whatever.

9. I write blogs so that if you have a particular enemy in mind you can tell the bloke to read my blog. The poor soul shall be bored to death and you won’t have to get into the murky deeds of real killing after all, thus preventing crime.

10. Since Barrack Obama got the Nobel peace prize, with my heartiest congratulations to him, us rest folks can happily say “yes we can” too. (By the way, Obama is mind numbingly handsome. HAD to say this.)

P.S: this does not have any political connotation. (my school gang will understand this part :P)

P.P.S: I won't accept any criticism to this post. I want the Nobel. I want it I want it I want it.

Of family values.

2009-10-05T10:08:00.004+05:30

It’s an untold rule that one must not study much in college. Class twelve boards was the last Big Thing as they said. If I venture to take out a book my parents glare at me in a manner as if I have just ruined the family reputation with my action. I glare back with a ‘you-guys-are-the-professors’ look and my mother starts chanting about how she enjoyed life in college that included 17 cinema hall shows of Aradhana movie and how they all never let studies interfere in their happening life. My father rants about how he would bunk classes, slipping out from the back door on knees, play table tennis and woo girls along with it, and similar sojourns to the riverside and Botanical Garden. It sounds so dreamy but it’s true. In this family, I am the one more keen on scholastic proficiency than the rest, and my parents and sister categorically chide me for my pedagogic exhibitions. So I have decided to uphold the name of my family, abandon studies for a long while and enjoy life… err… get a life.

Some excerpts from the family jungle:

Me: (hyper-stressed, before class 12 finals) I can’t study nor concentrate and I don’t know what to do. (Whining tone)
Father: Don’t study. Watch the television and relax till you get bored.
Mother: The problem was created by Vidyasagar. He shouldn’t have ensured women’s education. Too stressful for us.

Philosophy teacher to my father: your daughter has not attended my class for a long long time.
Father: (with a proud smile) After all she is my daughter. It’s in the genes.

Me: I got 57 out of 100 in Bengali. (Considering it was the Second Language, that was low.)
Father: (genuine smile) Lovely that my daughter could score so high. I would get around twenty at the most in school and thus I abandoned Bengali after a while.
Mother: Initially bothered as she was superb in Bengali, ends up singing to me: Just chill chill, just chill.

I rest my case.
Off to get a life.

screwed.

2009-09-25T09:38:00.000+05:30

Leaving a Bong fuming and smoking is easy. You just need to drag the oaf out of Calcutta during Pujo. I was going teary eyed at the very thought of it all the time till it’s actually just about four hours left for me to catch the flight, and I must say that finally I am rather excited. But my excitement has been rather marred by one big thing: aeroplane.

I know it will sound silly but I am stiff scared of them. According to my twisted logic, the repercussion of boarding one is being the victim of a crash. One of my friends meekly suggested that I should be proud as I am like Meg Ryan in French Kiss (the movie, pervs. From which a Kajol-Ajay Devgan starrer was badly pinched, in all the wrong places). In return I meekly cursed him. the only silver lining are the flight Stewarts and they are too good for me to even steal occasional glances, and though airhostesses are fine, the degree of my fear and my orientation makes them trivial.

I’ve packed a Jeeves series and also one of those William books (William the conqueror) that amazed me when I was eleven or twelve, hoping that they’ll keep me off my scary thoughts. (That reminds me, I had crush on Wooster at a point of time and even William, when I was his corresponding age. I know, it’s really very sad. But nevertheless, William is a Man.)

Anyway, so it’s going to be a week of abstinence from blogging and Orkutting which is pretty great. I’ll be having a life. So this consolation should keep me away from my rather weird fears.

Parenting blues.

2009-09-22T11:23:00.002+05:30

Not mine. My parents’. My mother was perhaps born a feminist. On being asked what she was going to do if she was cursed with two boys and not two angelic girls like us, she first looked at the hapless person (me) who had the audacity to pip in the question in a way as if it was outrageous for the person to think that she could ever produce anything as crass as boys. Then she replied that they would be packed off to boarding schools once off their nappies. So for quite some time my parents were pretty content with life, my sister and me. Both we siblings were pretty cute. (I was actually pretty till class one or so. If I maintained all of my cuteness it would have been pretty glorious for me.) My parents were content to think that girls are organised, clean, keeps their rooms nice and pink. But then I grew up. I don’t know what I will be doing if I stay at a hostel. Already there isn’t any space for me to sleep on the bed as it is adorned with books of all odd shapes and sizes with CDs strewn all over. my bed also happens to be the haven of lizards occasionally for whom I have a special long ruler to harass. I’ve seen rooms of boys which are cleaner. And this part especially saddens my mother the most. My parents are baffled as to where I got these particular genes from considering the fact that my mother, father and sister all three are always perfectly neat and tidy. (Also: all three are healthy wealthy and wise whereas I look like an anorexic cat.) Mother once rued that there was no point in producing a daughter if she can’t keep things clean. So I suppose now she is more kind towards the thoughts of young things of the male kind.

p.s: below: that's my sister trying to hold me. Take note of the bald patch on my head. That still exists.

disaster prevention and management

2009-09-20T23:36:00.004+05:30

Love is in the air. With the Durga Pujo coming in, its desi Valentines Day in Bongdom. Ready-to-temporarily-mingle men lurk in every nooks and corners of the idol as equally enthusiastic femme fatales and PYTs manage to play the hide and seek to its full effect. It’s the season of blossoming love affair, surviving for a week, ending on the last day of the Great Bengali Festival itself, truly short and sweet. For all these to come into effect, a man must remain religiously single or else more than half the fun is gone. I mean, it’s necessary because you can’t possibly lech away to glory with full effect if your permanent lady love is adorned on your arm. This is one very Bong reason why a man should stay single.

There are other reasons as well I suppose. Like for example, phone calls. Some girls have this habit (like some boys) of calling the umpteenth number of times and when after a very hard day’s work, the poor man manages to pick up the phone, the silly goat on the other end is all geared up to sulk and brood and accuse and what not. Here is this macho man, all pumped up with unending love for his lady that breaks all barriers of technology and thus does not need a 24*7 bonding network, while the aforementioned silly goat thinks otherwise. On top of that one has to pay to waste time in this manner. Those glorious days of pigeons playing negotiators of lovers (kabutar ja ja ja…) are gone. For real men, its better to stay single than mingle with the goats whose measure of love and et cetera is calculated by the daily phone minutes. Technology has ruined all dil ka connection. The icing on the already stale cake is the constant demand from the whiny dolt as to how many minutes and seconds have the folk managed to miss her. So much of time management is totally and utterly disastrous.

We girls have very intelligent brains so we draw immediate inference from propositions from sheer scientific Aristotelian logic. So if Hunk-A has not called Chick-A, and Hunk-A is not receiving calls from Chick-A on a given particular day, then Hunk-A is not interested anymore in Chick-A. The probabilities of devious Chicks B to Z doing the Hunk stealer stuff increases manifold and Chick-A is left feeling depressed. But the depressed chick may fail to understand that Hunk is probably busy with FIFA or the likes, or watching Messi glide through the stadium or is simply busy snoring or watching weird movies. No common sense, such girls.

There are many more reasons why we sometimes pose as a pain in the posterior, like being unable to understand whatever that can be very simply understood, shedding away tears to glory to achieve ones end, unable to realise the reason why a certain shirt should be worn and not made into floor mops, et cetera. A guy when single, at least till the age of a quarter century, is left without all these burdens that are in essence so heavy on the youthful shoulders. And sans these burdens, not only the Pujo season in Calcutta, but almost all the seasons can be enjoyed with perfect delight.

P.S: There has been no attempt at generalisation in this post. It has been posted with particular people on mind. :p

Senti stuff. Posted strictly for myself ;-)

2009-09-17T20:11:00.002+05:30

The problem with me is that whenever I am senti I can’t write anything. The thing is that I actually miss those days when I could spontaneously do whatever I wanted to, not that I can’t do that anymore, just that the blessed fellows who were my accomplices are hard to get hold of in these busy times, and a trip without them isn’t half as joyful. It would be like, hopping on to a tram and going till its last stoppage, and then coming back in the same way, virtually wasting hours of my life doing almost nothing, but then it made me really happy. And they say happiness extends lifetime, so I was not wasting time but adding more to it.

I have these weird desires to go to places. I like the sea more than the mountains. Those big things scare me bit and I end up being phobic that the wind is going to shove my down the hill slope. The sea is quite sensuous and I am always eager to take a snooze near it, as it works well with my lazy nature, with sporadic shots of hyper-active enthusiasm. I like being near rivers and seas and can even deal with lakes and all that. I really enjoy dangling my legs from the edges of Victoria Memorial’s semi-moat like thing and then taking a walk back through the interiors of the muddy-green Maidan where mules and horses laze around too, and where, as a child, I remember a rather unruly monkey, supposedly trained, almost eating up my balloon as I cursed the irate fellow amidst showers of tears. Prinsep and the river side is an old lover, from where our lives begun and we grew. There are times when I am bored and I think of the things that I enjoy the most. Around the Eden Gardens and across the field at night, Prinsep and the train, Dalhousie with an umbrella, four people and rain. It’s like poetry with a tune, and penning them down, almost profane.

The relationship that confused me...

2009-09-10T19:58:00.001+05:30

I have realised what I should have realised ages ago. Our relationship has been for long and it was fun I admit. But then as I got rooted into the quagmire, I realised the loopholes of what I thought was the ideal bond. I don’t want to break free. No matter what you think, I am not someone who would let go of what is perhaps the most precious thing in her life. But then, I’ve realised my mistakes, know what irreparable damages have been made and I can’t do anything about it. The fetters of the relationship hurt, but I can’t let go…

Yes. I can never let go of the internet from my life.

The fact is that my relationship with the internet has been almost parasitic. I have been clinging to Orkut and the likes for the last few years, gaping at the screen in a manner an adolescent often gapes at the member of the opposite sex. I’ve also enrolled myself into the Facebook thingy that I can’t even remotely decipher after technically having account for eight months. The internet has almost shaped my personality. My total confusion in many things in life has been caused by… err… Facebook. I tell you, when I took a personality test over there they said I am like Ross of Friends. And the batty folks later said that I am like Winston Churchill. And the animal I resemble is an orang-utan. So the simple logical conclusion is:

Ross = Winston Churchill = Me = Orang-utan

I was content up to the Churchill part till the site gave me a dose of reality with the hapless animal. Though I blame the internet for the sheer confusion that springs up whenever I try to analyse myself, not that I should get into analysing it anyway, I shall be indebted to it for many things. Anyway, the topic is rather touchy for me. I don't even know why I am blogging about it, may be just to kill time. However, enough time has been killed. Now I'll be resting in peace with the orangutan inherent in me.

Rain and the associated mood

2009-09-08T12:16:00.003+05:30

It has been pouring all day. It’s been a long time since I’ve woken up to such a dull morning where even the crows refuse to execute their morning orchestra. Our garden was never in a respectable shape, always looking like a mound of weeds, and at this moment, it has managed to take the shape of murky stagnant pond. Most in my class has been cursed with a perennially running nose and as I sniffed away to glory yesterday with a torn tissue, a professor continued to glare at me in a manner as if I am that bloody hog that started it all.

The cats loath the downpour as well. The sexy female in the block recently had proliferated the feline world with five more folks. Thanks to the rain they have made our balcony their make shift home and two of the overgrown off-springs are sprinting up and down a grubby ladder that is kept there, occasionally trying to pinch my lunch kept in the kitchen that exists in its periphery. So my task at home is to be the watchdog. What utter joy.

As for me, I am hoping against hope that some miserly folk like me will come online to wile away my time. I can’t even do the sexy-lady-with-a-coffee-mug-romantically-looking-from-the window because the effect from a grilled window would be like desolate-freaky-kid-stuck-with-a-mug-glaring-from-the-window. I don’t have any story book at this moment that will lift up my mood from the deluge apart from my history books and those are the last things I want to set my eyes on, rain or no rain.

It’s still pouring. And no amount of typing is going to lift up my spirit. I’ve got nothing fruitful to do. I guess I’ll just snore away for a while. Good afternoon and Goodnight.

P.S: A fellow intelligent blogger pointed out an essential point I had missed: about the mighty insects. Yes friend, there are reigning supreme all over. Some are sprawled on by bed too. Bloody buggers. For information on other things on the loose, check the comments :| But I am not responsible for all that is discussed there :|

timepass

2009-09-05T19:12:00.003+05:30

Calcutta’s sky has been behaving like my mood: highly whimsical, alternating rain with occasional peek-a-boo of the sun. Its one of those highly romantic evenings, where the happy romantics would like to sit with a cup of coffee, sipping near a cosy window, conversing with the drizzle. Some would like to read a good book snuggled in the bed, with some stolen chocolates. Some would like some senti music. Some would like to go out, and some would like to get into censored activities. As for me, eternally confused, I am trying to blog. This virtual world has virtually ruined me. It has caged me, making me incapable of communicating with nature, letting my soul be free... All right, no more melodrama.

Anyway, the crux of the matter is that it's an absolutely hyper-senti weather and I am disregarding its utility by attempting to blog.

I am such a nuisance. :P

Enough. Time-passed.

Life and its poetry

2009-08-30T23:50:00.002+05:30

Whenever I want to write something poetic, invariably I end up goofing up the whole romantic inspiration that I had intended to pen down, and the thing turns out to be shabbily prosaic. It then appears to be that I am plagiarising my Oscar-winning-like thoughts to churn out Bollywood potboilers of the Chunkey Pandey type. It’s like whenever one is at his romantic best, wants to dole out some Shakespearean romance to his lady love, expressing how senti the pretty lass can make him and all that, and he ends up saying something as crass as “I love you babe”. I mean, it’s told by every soul to some other special soul who eventually ditches the fellow after a few days, when in the process of saying the same old sentence to some other new fellow. (I guess you’ve got the hang of it.)

I saw this highly intellectual movie yesterday, and it triggered my latent intellectual side and I decided to pen down something poetic. The weather was perfect. Light breeze, sound of leaves. Starry night reminding me of the song, and I began writing. After scribbling and scratching out almost a whole page, I drew a pig. I even hunted down the cupboard to unearth my ages old colour pencils and coloured it pink with red rimmed heart shaped sunglass. So that was the prosaic homicide of my lyrical thoughts.

I stared at the pig for long. It has become some motif of sorts in my life. Nothing can possibly happen to my life if my fascination lies in drawing pigs. But then I don’t mind. I really enjoy drawing pigs.

(this is an old drawing but the one I did yesterday was almost the same as this, if not better :|)

P.S: I wrote about pigs and I forgot to mention swine flu. Totally blasphemous.

Q and A

2009-08-28T20:46:00.001+05:30

Q: What does a person do if she finds that she is rather ugly?
A: restore her self confidence by saying that she is ugly with brains.
Q: What does an ugly person do if she finds that she is ugly without brains? (but can fake intelligence occasionally)
A: Be like me :|

One of my I-am-depressed phases going on. Shall soon recover. :D

mortification

2009-08-23T11:21:00.001+05:30

The Gods are so pleased with me that they are hurling entertainments into my life almost daily. My sister chanced upon some saved online chats more of the private types between me and the man whom I claim to be my brother because of our skinny quotient. With excitement and adrenalin all oozing out she finally decided to ask me on the matter, realising that her sister is perhaps not that much of a loser. I was stumped for obvious reasons, imagining my sister to conjure up in her head that I am into all the birds and flowers of Hindi movie stuff. She’s also in the reciprocal state of being stumped as her kid sister is mingling to glory.

But sadly it is not all that happening. No Bad Man is ‘manoeuvring me’ to achieve his cruel ends, I won’t be kidnapped and tied to chains like the damsel in distress of Bollywood. We are more like two useless best of chums eyeing each other because we have no better options around us :D And I must say that I'm having fun in life, as usual. But I must say the fairer sex was rather enthused, probably because this would be the first time that someone won’t discard him as a mere geek.

Anyway, Gods, I love you all, but no more excitement please.

For they are jolly good fellows

2009-08-22T18:20:00.002+05:30

In remembrance of the deed that was not done. (this post deals with only a few fellows concerned)

They went, they saw and they conquered. Their temptations. Here in this college where men literally chew on grass like cows, these glorious folks paid for it and watched as others snorted their money to grassy glory. This is the reason why I like these folks. We have the potentials to be absolute-geeky losers and love most of the moments of it when we are not cribbing. Life is beautiful :D

Eyeing the Forbidden Fruit

2009-08-08T11:11:00.003+05:30

Human nature is highly predictable I suppose. If there is anything that we are told not to prod our nose into, our mighty olfactory immediately gets into it and shoves hard. (Thought to ponder upon: our finance minister’s snout is always red… does that imply he is always digging in and out the clutter? Sorry). I don’t know much about other souls as to where they want to dig and why and into whom, metaphorically speaking. But as for people like me who’s at the mighty edge of teenage hood and still haven’t been able to shed her hyper-active adolescent curiosity, the enthusiasm to poke the nose covers a wide area.

A soul’s Orkut status reads that one should get a life instead of reading his scrapbook. I being the responsible chick online took the cue and read a few pages of his forbidden book and informed him that there is nothing interesting in it barring a girl who is desperately asking him as to why the blighted phone was not being received at midnight. I felt sorry for the folk considering the fact that us rice-and-fish Bengalis prefer to be in a state of deep slumber with a bloated gassy stomach particularly at that specific hour of the day. We all have an inherent Adam and Eve eyeing for the glossy forbidden fruit, the desire to do what is forbidden.

Whenever there is an exam we feel sleepy, the probability of yawning multiplies, the desire to pick nose, get interested in others’ lives, play Uno, watch Tollywood potboilers, talk mindless crap, increases manifold. Contemplation of successful matrimonial ads to escape the wrath of examinations is also on the minds. Or whenever some chick is trying to hide her handsome hunk of a boyfriend from the coveting eyes of her desperate girlfriends, us petty friends get all the more nosier, trying to find out the exact physical and mental composition of the victim of a hunk, as well as the exact physical and mental composition of the virtuous bond between the aforementioned hunk and the friend.

Or whenever someone’s mother tells her to shred the bones from the fish that has got a rather complicated skeletal structure, she starts to write a post for her blog instead of combating the fish.

Anyway,

I must rush.

Or else Ma will slaughter me with the fish bone and then there will be no fish chop for lunch.

New thing on the block

2009-08-04T10:33:00.011+05:30

In this world where most souls are always updated with the latest cool item in the electronic world, I was meandering rather shabbily with a cell phone that only had the basics and a radio. I loved it as my technological know-how doesn’t let me go beyond listening to the radio after fumbling for the channels. Then the think suddenly zonked off. And my heart broke. To top up I even lost all the numbers stored. But then thanks to my archaic sense of storing things I had all my phone numbers written behind my erstwhile history copy which I had happily donated to the newspaperwala. All very sad. I grumbled with my father who decided to get me one, since he thinks if a stay without a cell phone it will be difficult for him to contact me when I finally elope with the neighbourhood laundry-boy

So there I go to the shop, show my old cell to the rather good looking guy over there, and say that I want one exactly like my old one. The retarded being smirks, a foolish bloke immersed in the sticky world of materialism who can’t fathom my eternal love for my old cell phone. Then he shows me one which looks almost like my old one, a modern version of it- black, no slides or flips or twists and turns, and it has also got a camera (Awww. My first camera cell phone. It has also got the Bluetooth thingy that I can’t use because of my technical deficiencies in my brain. And it has sudoku! :P) I was gushing with pride as the folk successfully made me into a materialistic moron like him. (Kidding. I was one since ages).

The first few pics I clicked were of our neighbourhood tomcat who happens to be highly camera friendly. I clicked away to glory as he posed with side, frontal and rear views. I like this feline fellow. He is usually always perched up on our kitchen dustbin and doesn’t go away when I warn with my very dangerous and deadly ‘shoo’. He has got lots of attitude-of-da-cool-dude and makes me seem insignificant and definitely inferior to him for being a human. He has got strings of girlfriends whom he woos underneath our car, which is very disturbing. For the car. He also defies the law set by nature that a cat should be afraid of the canine beings. He again gives them The Look that makes every dog feel… whatever the doggy feels. Guess you can get a hang of it. If not, doesn’t matter.

Anyway, the thing is, I am pretty elated because of the new thing I’ve got and also because the wonders of technology amaze me. (Note: a skinny friend who doesn't read this blog couldn't use a cell phone till class 12. I adore this fellow :p) And it isn't much more of a burden on my father's pocket than my previous one, so that satiated my girlie sense of getting a good bargain without actually plunging into those bargaining brawls. (I mean, I can't bargain for a cell phone unless it's Chinese. Infact I cannot bargain at all. don't qualify as a girl in this criterion. And I was again about to deviate from the topic.) The best thing is the sudoku part which I can solve to glory (so far) whenever I get bored. I know you I-know-it-all fellows might be smirking but I am like that, rather backward in this field. But nevertheless I miss my old one. :( (Same reason why my father doesn't want to sell our 1983 model Fiat jalopy that we don't use anymore. We all love it. And it's a really sexy car.)

Nostalgia. Sigh.

anyway here are some pics of the fellow:

P.S: I use brackets and the word 'anyway' too often. I had written an answer in class five examination with first, second and third brackets to explain in a sentence, if it qualifies as one, some obscure thing related to science. And I checked out in a 'which Friends character are you' quiz that I am really like Ross. :|

Curious case of the dog on blogtime. :|

2009-07-21T22:19:00.004+05:30

Fame is followed by spiteful intrigues. And if the famous victim of all conspiracies happens to be someone like me who totally lacks seriousness in certain issues, then the twist and turns are often hilarious, though at times they tend to harp on highly sore and sensitive strings. Some anonymous being had been stalking this ill-reputed blog, and a typo-brawl ensued with another being of the milder kind. A few spectators including me left the members of the blog-fight club to do their own thing. I mean, audience aren’t supposed to meddle in wars between valiant men. (I did meddle, trying to delete a few of their arguments but since I have a life other than being online, I left without completing the task. Very unfortunate.) This happened to hurt the sentiment of another fellow being of an even milder form. Thus I was categorised as a person who fakes being someone else in the blog, etc etc. now that charged me up big time. A few comments later some another being, not of a milder form, commented on the blog of the being whose sentiment I did hurt, that he’ll sue him for criticising. I found this mildly hilarious; (though I don’t know who the legally expedient bloke is, but I have got my hunches, considering the fact that I lamented about the whole funny mishap to a few in one of the social networking sites other than my blog-comments :p) thanks to my complete lack of seriousness which I wish to imbibe in course of writing this post. So I have been blocked by the kind soul, who thinks that I have declared legal war against him. So is the story.

But amidst all this, barring the fact that I respect people who know when to draw lines if something goes against their principles, I still find things funny. Therefore, finally I have come across something in me that I needn’t be complacent about, barring my weight and physical attributes. It’s my complete apathy towards seriousness in life. So from now onwards, I shall be amputating my funny-bone (which was limited to a few classical jokes stolen from wiser friends and family) and from now onwards my blog shall be thoroughly serious, with grim professorial language that I am sure is somewhere latent in me.

May the Gods help me.

P.S: Need not jeer. I really couldn't think of a better title. :D And calling myself a dog does not amount to any gaali. They are good beings.

Can't think of a title... What the heck. :P

2009-07-19T13:55:00.005+05:30

The college I just got myself into is our family’s hereditary college or something like that. An obscure great grandpa was a physicist there, and then gradually the rest started ditching science, with my grandfather and parents dealing with geography and me finally completing the process of dumping by taking up history. My parents and sister were all teary eyed and all that as I got myself admitted. A friend has even mustered up the audacity to say that the college is responsible for the existence of my sister and me, since my parents were classmates there when my father started to eye the gorgeous chic that in course of time produced the two of us. But history shall not repeat itself. Those days had handsome hunks like my father.

But this institution is highly weird. On the first day we came across this teacher who had gravity defying chest hair sprouting up from his disco shirt like savannah on a fertile land. And then he started teaching us about the Neanderthal Man.

A few days later we saw him in a gorgeous car with an equally gorgeous wife. Evolution of man. He taught us about that too.

Then a second lady teacher came up to say instantly that it was our duty to utilise her. I could hear the sudden tremor coming from the direction of the boys’ benches.

The college canteen has been the hub of all ideas for generations, or so all the seniors claim in the college. Me, the poor new kid, went there and found everything normal at the first sight. Then a few girls started singing and a boy started to play the guitar to a completely different tune. Then dogs flew. They leapt onto the tables, jumped over them like they were rings of fire, played 'crouching tiger hidden dragon', darted towards the students whom they fancied, stopping midway to find a good spot to release themselves. They were the superheroes minus the chaddis, doing their own thing in their super-land. They perhaps lick the plates clean on which we get our food. Saves water that way. Very environmental. There is a legend that a surplus of chicken product in the canteen is usually attributed to one of the dogs giving birth to her litters. I could see that the fable has got the possibility of some authenticity.

There are also these legendary cobwebs in the sky high classroom ceilings that the ancient spiders webbed as my forefathers attended classes. Talk about continuity of time. They cannot be cleaned because no normal ladder can go up to that height. They are also there as part of the heritage building.

I must admit that I am enjoying this place. :p

P.S: on a completely different topic: Rakhi Sawant is on every blogger’s mind. Well, almost. I was hopping from one blog to another in my list and at least five, including me, had her name or at least something related to her mentioned in their blogs. Ah, the Lady India that shall unite us all. :P

Noorie...noorie... :|

2009-07-15T19:04:00.000+05:30

When there is a set of rules one unfortunately often forgets the hapless minorities. I mean, the XXS size is way larger than me, stupid world. They forget that beings like me exist too. College fresher’s welcome is supposed to be ideally this angelic happy-go-lucky get together where the juniors and the seniors alternately smile at each other till they get bored and then continue the process with each and everyone, in between blaring music through cracked jukeboxes and desi chilly chicken and fried rice. It’s supposed to make us new kids on the block feel like oh-my-god-this-is-home kind of a feeling, with tear bedimmed eyes and all that. To break the ice one is supposed to be made to feel comfortable, then why oh god why are girls supposed to wear saris and not something else they wish to, and the boys are supposed to wrap themselves up in dhotis, grandpa style? With these stupid boys who wear polka dot boxers underneath some hyper-translucent dhotis roaming all over like batty cows, life can’t get worse for a moaning sissy like me.

I vehemently agree that girls look drop dead gorgeous in all those yards of cloth, elevated to the position of being woo-worthy by people of all genders. There have been times when even I have followed PYT in the form of girls like a lovestruck Romeo. But then the option of wearing something else must be there, for extreme minority souls like me who weigh precisely 36.5 kilograms including weight of shoes, clothes and braces. How do they expect me to find drapes of my size? I suggested to my mother that I tear one of hers to something smaller, but her glaring eyes prevented me from executing the idea. Anyway it’s not me who’s going to bear the brunt of this decision of the elderly peeps out there. If all of a sudden they get the spook of seeing a ghoulish invisible body wrapped in a pale sari, it’s not my fault. They should have known.

mystifying queries of life and all that.

2009-07-12T11:17:00.003+05:30

If nothing else, life definitely has an extra dosage of question and answer till you hit 30 after which the hyper-curious hormonal blobs seem to finally comprehend the red signal. Not that I am chastising others. I am as curious as these fellows, just smart enough to keep my mouth shut on some occasions. Though the difficulty level of the questionnaire pattern gets higher as one proceeds up in the age-ladder till its time for the person to don the hat of the quiz master himself, us young mortals standing with shaky hairy legs on the precipice of teenagehood aren’t spared either. It’s not the aunts and uncles but also one’s compatriots, compromised in the same position. I don't mean to say that I dislike such things, considering the fact that I bombard them at times too :p The questions range from embarrassing to questions that are utterly mystifying where hunting for the reason is concerned:

1. Do you have a boyfriend? (I dislike the terminology.)
Depends on whom you classify as a boyfriend. No I have eight male consorts whom I replace every month keeping the quota for married people constant as young souls like my get a boost in the matter of the hearts where older men are concerned.

2. What are you planning to do after college?
I intend to get married after giving ad in the matrimonial or allowing my parents to bribe a male thing into marrying me and then shall be solely concerned with knitting, sewing, cooking and mild population explosions.

3. Why do you want to study history and not English honours?
Oh it’s very simple I am too good in English and I know everything so I needn’t study that. I am studying history to further intellectualise myself so that I can impress the bribed folks who’ll be my in-laws.

4. How are the boys in your college? (Cheesy grin).
Where? What? Is this a co-educational institution? I didn’t notice.

5. Why won’t you sit for the IAS examination after college?
That’s because I am too intelligent to study for that.

6. Why are you so thin?
Thank god you said that. I am dieting. Does it show? Pretty please tell me. I’ll be so happy (gasping for breath in excitement.)

7. What do you want to become in life?
An owner of a male harem with men wearing skimpy clothes. I’ll throw one rupee notes as they shall dance like Rakhi Sawant.

8. What have you done with your boyfriend? (Sleazy grin or glaring eyes.)
I only have a male consort. (Rest of the answer is censored.)

9. Have you studied for the examination?
Yes and I am expecting nothing less than 100 percent in the result. I am great.

10. The best one of the lot: Why do you blog?
Hmm. I see. Hmm.

P.S: Merlin humbly and unknowingly provided what the college couldn’t. Thank you, old friend. May you find all the answers to your SQCA.

happy and gay... and why not?

2009-07-11T21:31:00.002+05:30

Since time immemorial men have been men. Then god started making them ugly. Adam and Eve was one happy go lucky pair in the Garden of Eden. Then they had to do the thingummy with the apple. The problem with time is that it has a tendency to be wild. I mean, Adam and Eve could have easily rested in peace, doing all the things that they were supposed to do if you know what I mean. But the fellows got bored and what follows changed the course of history, or myth or whatever.

So to go back to what I was saying, at a point of time men were men. Now they wax their chest. Previously God made women like Aphrodite. Now they make things like me. I have this belief that when a business expands and production rises because of higher demand, and public being the way they are constantly wanting faster and better service, the divine bloke can’t make all people look like salivating-worthy anymore.

With the number of men dwindling, women are bound to choose women as their partners, and since the bloke up in the sky can’t make many gorgeous women anymore, brawny men have to choose their waxed counterparts. And since the Almighty still knows his art well, provided it is sent in limited numbers, there are still some good looking women and men who are Men, being sent to earth, so it’s not that all are so called deviant folks, and therefore religious groups needn’t worry their pretty heads about misbalancing the social structure and all that. So decriminalising gay sex is an act that follows the course of nature, and it also helps to reduce population. With all its plus points, I can’t see why homosexuality shouldn’t be decriminalised.

I am simply trying to explain to the jammed heads that being gay isn't abnormal. Just because a group is in the minority doesn't mean that they'll have to adhere to the norms of the majority. With all the quotas in India we should already know.

Doh :|

2009-07-11T20:59:00.003+05:30

One of the reasons why I should be burdened with examinations and exam related depression is that they provide me with the adrenalin to waste time. Since I am a rather eminent nincompoop I’d pass my time writing blogs and hence this place would at least have respectful posts for it to swank.

College life commences. It will be wrong for me to claim that I have been dreading this. There is something genuinely wrong with me apart from the fact that I can give Kiera Knightly inferiority complex where skinniness is concerned. One is supposed to be this lost fish kicked out of water, gasping for the life saving drops or else would get conked then and there. I mean, a bloke isn’t really human if he isn’t chickening out with this new-place thingy. I am supposed to do some frustration-ventilating head banging, poem writing and the et cetera. but me being the odd person that I am, I went there, barring the first two days when I hovered around with glassy eyes thinking I am going to be badgered to death by some opinionated honchos, I actually found college pretty similar to school. Except for the fact that our school had more boys. Or that there are small human chimneys here and there to which I am slightly allergic, to say the least. Or, like school, I am the skinniest kid in the block. I am a tad bit concerned about this abnormality of mine.

My earnest petition

2009-06-24T12:07:00.002+05:30

Dear Lord,

This was supposed to happen. And now I’ll have to metamorphose myself into something at least minutely sociable. I’ll have to buy a pair of skinny jeans. Half a pair and some alterations. That will be sufficient for me. I also need to buy some fair and lovely. My friends have already started using them and I don’t want to lag behind. I am fair, but the cream will make me lovely. I also need a notes-boyfriend. The type who collects notes and gives them to me. In history they don’t take boys. So I will do with a notes-girlfriend. Our relationship shall be limited to notes exchange for I don’t think I’ll be capable of anything else with a girl. I’ll also have to study very discreetly. I will have to shed my geeky image and pretend to stop studying. Then if I do well in an examination I can behave like someone with an exceptionally high I.Q who needn’t study. I’ll have to avoid all those blokes who say that I should sit for the IAS examination after graduating. I am tired of parroting to them that I talk too much to become a diplomat. Avoiding those who ask me what I want to do after completing my studies is also on the cards. These two covers almost all the people on earth barring a few benign souls who are smart enough to not meddle with my blurry future. I’ll also learn to bunk a few classes and have an attendance bordering on low and very low. If I don’t do this I shall be regretting it for the rest of my life.

There. I have got my college priorities straight. Do grant me the powers to grant me my wishes.

Amen.

Brain dead

2009-06-21T11:03:00.001+05:30

I wake up at ten, laze around with the newspaper and switch on the computer, which is equivalent to connecting to the internet. I have my breakfast of toasts, cereals and imagine myself getting fat on such a meagre diet, and then gaze at Orkut hoping that by some miracle at least someone or the other is online to get rid of this morning ennui

I know what I’ll do in the evening. Take a nap or watch a movie. If the movie defies all sense and sensibility I’ll manage to do both simultaneously. I’ll go out in the evening for a while, take a stroll, run away from the street dogs, whistle at good looking peeps on earth and look surprised when they stare back, Then I’ll worry a bit about admissions and all that. I’ll come back home, stay online till I am ready to drop on to the keyboard and start snoring. And then I’ll haul myself up to Bedford. Again I’ll wake up the next day. And the cycle shall continue.

In brief, with such a boring passing of time, I really don’t have anything to blog about.

Apology

2009-06-20T21:41:00.003+05:30

I should be killed. Guillotined. Neck snapped to perfection so that I die without more ado. I am such a nuisance.

I said that I don’t like rain when I am out. Oh God I do. I like the rain in any form I swear. I am even ready to chant poems about the drizzles if that bring in the shower. This weather is being such a nuisance to mankind. With all the heat rashes I look like an ugly kid advertising for itch-guard. How am I to be presentable for the matrimonial columns? I can’t even use Fair and Lovely because it does not have any yellow-skin removal formula.

I've bought a pair of shorts and am roaming around in minimal clothing which, contrary to popular belief, is a scorching eye-sore to mankind. I can't help it. This post is just an apology to all for writing that I don’t like rain when I am out. May the rain Gods read this humble petition. :(

Last-minute freak :D

2009-06-20T21:13:00.005+05:30

It’s conventional for a four plus old toddler to wail at anything that even remotely displeases the litter. I cried when the nursery teacher would try to shake hands with me, offended that she was not doing justice to my active left hand, I cried when I couldn’t tie my shoe. I'd wail when I had nothing much to do. It was a very good time-pass that I perfected. I moaned myself up till class two or so, and then I sobered down I guess for some obscure reasons, mostly because I started becoming nerdy. (Though I haven't lost it all. I still have my fits of sporadic moaning here and there.)

But the problem lies in the fact that I am not supposed to do this when I get into college. I mean, I can’t sit down and fling my arms and legs all over and wail at 150 decibels the moment I enter college and succumb to the school leaving nostalgia. I’d be labelled an immature prick, and I should be. Hence this college thing has become somewhat of a very poignant poke at the posterior. It’s not that I am not eager to get into college. I don’t want to remain in school anymore. I loved being in school. My attendance bears testimony to that. I even enjoyed being sent to unnecessary errands by some teachers. The school drills something into our hormones that makes all its students short, barring a few. So I had to look at people usually like me. But the sight of normal-weighing taller Complan girls in the colleges will make the ambience in the college decidedly different. I know the girls are going to be nice. Only nice people take up history I’d like to think. (I just mentioned girls since boys, or else people with normal manly hormones do not study history as a rule) though I'll be absolutely fine in college I know, but then I’ll miss my literally level headed school crowd and the people I hang around with.

Sigh.

break-time :p

2009-06-08T17:53:00.003+05:30

It’s one of those days when I feel literarily constipated. No amount of purgatives in the form of books has cured my condition. After rushing to colleges like some wild boar on the run, I’m tired. Almost dead meat. Rather, dead bone. At the same time life isn’t throwing up some anything even remotely thrilling. I don’t need much hullabaloo in my life but had others’ lives been more exciting I would have survived instead of being consumed by boredom. I have even got a decent result in my exams so my channel of cribbing has been sealed. And I can’t go on writing that I am thin and about my future plans of gaining weight or hair transplantation. They are old subjects, I’ve got used to these tragedies in my life and even I am bored wailing about that. I mean, moaning won't make me get back my long lost epitome. So for the time being, unless something interesting crops up, I am going to take a sabbatical from blogging. Till then, I’ll spend my time watching the birds and relaxing with cucumber on my eyes. :p

It's raining dogs, and cat

2009-05-25T12:14:00.005+05:30

The rain makes me want to fly
Like a… pig under the cloudy sky.

(Pardon me, I was never poetic and this good weather hasn’t done anything good to my prosaic mind either.)

The rain has always brought romanticism to people. They all want to fling their arms and legs like performing some sort of a dervish bhangra, and drench themselves in the deluge. They don’t bother about their umbrellas or whether it’s doing some odd gymnastics. They just let go, waggling their hands from the umbrella if possible, to feel the pitter-patter. Amongst all these happy nature loving fellows I see this thin, shrunken being walking on the road, royally angry with the cheekiness of the umbrella to get upturned when it’s hammering on all sides. Not a sense of romanticism, this fellow. Has got all the potentials to be a dreary school principal in future, one who wears oversized dull grey skirts with excessively white and flat shoes. While some look at the sky to see the rain, she grumbles that it will wash off her contact lens and she’ll have to return home semi-blind. With a mere minus 3.75 myopic power she shouldn’t complain of being an owl in daytime but then that’s her way of amplifying situations, to finally engulf herself in self pity. She is someone I watch in delight. You can’t have a more comical spectacle on the road when it rains. She looks pathetically funny, all of less than forty kilograms, with her bones jutting out from all the odd places, and her lack of adequate adipose making her seemingly look like a newly shred shrunken and drenched chicken. I have seen her once fall down on the pavement as it was raining. I couldn’t hear but I can imagine she grumbled all the way back home. While little girls jump in glee in the puddles she worries more about the water that has got into her shoes and what infection it can spread. A girl can’t be more repulsive I must say. When all the girls in the road are drenched they make an adorable sight, but if you can see this fellow I am talking about, you’ll laugh out loud for she has an attitude of a sixty year old haggard, and spoils the scene altogether with her lousiness. She might pretend to like the rain for a while if she has company, but within minutes she’ll shed the charade and resume sulking, which she is really great at when it rains. Beware of such company, for they spoil the romance that surrounds you during monsoon. But if you are looking for a free circus with sulky tantrums thrown in, such a person is a delight.

At peace. Really.

2009-05-20T20:13:00.003+05:30

Examination results are always a day of celebration or grave condolence, depending on the numbers bequeathed by the generous boards of education. India’s clichéd ‘unity in diversity’ tagline is well represented even in the various board system of education in school. The old school blokes of west Bengal state boards are never on a high when it comes to donating some marks and hence plutocracy of the central board outputs are well established in the reputed institution. Sigh, they are the blessed souls.

I suppose such disparity is intentionally maintained because the government aims at a well balanced society. If all the good chicks get high marks and get dragged by the intellectual bandwagon, who will be left to deal with the domestic side of the balance? Here comes our state board which religiously limits the marks of their candidates and consequently churns out a large chunk of young things (the prettier being consumed by the Central) who are bestowed with enough (lack of) marks to be labelled as a bimbo. It’s these people who then help the matrimonial columns of the newspapers to prosper. It’s the less-marks obtaining students that actually hold the society together nowadays because they don’t even bother to surge towards the pursuit of professional happiness, and hence dwell in the domesticity of life.

Hence, I have no intention of cribbing when I get lower marks than Central board counterparts. I am merely doing my job in the society, without much effort. I’ll get my results, stick my tongue out to all those poor slogging people in the top notch colleges, have a laid back happy attitude towards life, pay for an ad in a well reputed newspaper and live happily ever after without seeking any intellectual or worldly knowledge. Am I complaining because I am a student under the West Bengal state board? Huh. Never. I am blissfully happy and at complete peace with my laid-back life.

On getting old :p

2009-05-20T17:45:00.005+05:30

I have managed to be 19 with a 36.3 kg weight and in spite of that hindrance I have had an interesting existence so far. Now I can relax like a laid back government employed bong for a long time. The birthday presents have definitely been queer and all had a same pattern, they brought back something of my bloomer-days. I bought a few books that are originally meant for those kids who have just begun to boast of a decent vocabulary in the lingua franca, and then I get a cd full of videos of songs of my recent yester-years. I remember spending 160 for a cassette which got entangled in the tape- recorder sooner than I could re-collect the money I had spent; only to get back those songs yesterday. Two friends today gifted me a set of poster colours, something that I never really owned as a kid in a complete set but yearned for it nevertheless. I was actually giggling like an old granny being shown photos of her youth when she was ogle-worthy. I may not have the opportunity to enjoy this situation when I am old unless I marry some rich tycoon and devote myself to the hands of an expert plastic surgeon in a jiffy, but it did remind me of those days when I was an even more geeky kid with fresh new spectacles and a denser summit.

At the age of nineteen, things are reminding me of my yester-years. Sigh. I am getting old. Not that I mind. I am surging towards better times anyway. :)

laziness syndrome

2009-05-15T16:24:00.002+05:30

It beguiles me how I have discarded reading fiction altogether. Not that I read non-fiction much but it has definitely got a more respectable position amongst the two. Briefly living in a fictitious world and then weaving dreams with the reality isn’t my cup of tea but then I have a high regard for great minds that do this. To tell the truth I am not really extraordinarily creative. I mean, I haven’t drawn any other animal or thing for the last two years apart from pigs, or men with balloon-shaped face and dark circles that look like gramophone records around the eyeball. Perhaps it’s this lack of creativity that stops me from seeking succour in the fabricated world and lace dreams that is way different from the world we live in. the only fiction I read nowadays and that too in the proximity of a commode is Jeeves, and I have been reading and re-reading Wodehouse’s miracle man since class six. That itself shows my limited literary ardour. Or else I must have placed Wodehouse on the epitome of all the storybook honchos and hence don’t bother with the rest. Or may be it's sheer laziness. I know I am good at it and I have a hunch that this is the reason. So far I can only scrape through the short stories if possible and with time I might even lose interest in this.

to a friend who'll come back soon :)

2009-05-14T17:48:00.002+05:30

It is quite abnormal to say that trampling through pigeon bombardments, fear of human excreta and sitting on the kingdom of ants has made me happy. But since I am abnormal I shall say so. Prinsep has always been like this. So will be two years hence. We’ll still be nibbling at the KFC chickens and analyse how much I have wasted. I’ll still be donating half of the chicken biriyani after taking a full-plate, and I shall perhaps remain the idiot who forsakes mutton rezala. (pray that I change.) I’ll still be thin and shall continue to wear tailor-made kurtas since the other option is to buy panjabees of 8 year old kids. I’ll still be cribbing about my skinniness without sparing others who are emaciated as well. I’ll still be capricious like a man ensnared between two hot chicks. (I wonder how I came up with this simile). I’ll still ogle at girls and you can call me not-so-straight for all I care. I shall still surprise with refined Bengali words here and there amidst all the mumbo-jumbo that I usually pass in the name of the language. I shall listen to the same songs again and again without bothering to listen to the other tracks in my hoard. And if the almighty permits, I shall still be the blessed girl who can finish her shopping in 15 minutes at new market. At the most I can be better, for there isn’t a possibility of me getting worse. At the most, I’ll be bald by two years. But then I can afford wigs and when I’ll get rich I’ll go for a lavish hair transplant. This is perhaps the most heartfelt post to my blog. And blame the sudden brouhaha on the good weather. My mood shall remain sunny till the rain continues.

'Stuck in second gear' ;-)

2009-05-11T21:31:00.000+05:30

Life is a lot like Friends except for all that hahaheehee in the background. But then things would be so much more fun if we had that background guffawing for real, though presumably it wouldn’t be fun for the object of all the hilarity. And as for me, if I were such a character, the laughter would have been continued incessantly (at me). I am a lot like Ross. The only difference is that he got hold of Rachel. Firstly, he married someone with whom his preferences didn’t match, even after a son. Amongst all my fellow classmates I am the one who has got a hundred percent chance of getting hold of a gay boyfriend, who might even look like Rachel, if not the ugly- step sister of Penelope Cruz; or at least similarly feminine. The fact that Ross is a palaeontologist, combined with the fact that I intend to study history if I can scrape through my examination proves the fact that we are equally mind-numbing and insipid. His fashion faux pas are of the same echelon as mine. As a kid I have worn the Bengali’s patented underwear-as-swimsuit in Digha with a mannequin like ease, I still can’t see why t-shirts can’t be worn over formal trousers that clutch you at odd places like aggressive crabs. Also I am about to be nineteen and I don’t have my ears pierced which I think is a blasphemy of some sorts. Also I stink like I am freshly out from a refrigerator storing stale dead fish and yet I forget to wear the deodorants. But then Ross was mugged as a kid and he even wrote a science boy fiction. Providentially I was never that much of a geek to be similar to him in these criteria as well. (Is being part of a group that created a magazine in class 6 equally geeky?) Nevertheless, similarities with him in other fields are rather disturbing for my sanity. And the final cliché? I even look like him, just shorter. But then, it doesn’t really matter. At least I look like some celebrity whom I devotedly love.

and divine chastisement follows...

2009-04-29T13:25:00.003+05:30

Resource is a man made creation as utilisation of it depends solely on mankind. Man is constantly endeavouring to create new resources while experimenting with resistances and neutral stuff so that even they can be utilised to accelerate development. It is man’s demands that are the forces behind development and this effort shall be interminable.

In short, we mortals are a greedy lot.

And castigation follows our gluttony.

Adam and Eve was a fine couple, they could do whatever they had to do in peace and harmony with nature. But then Adam had to have that apple and since then the male mankind has to deal with the lump in their throat. Cronus could have been living happily ever after with Rhea and the kids but he chose to gulp them down and thus the poor Zeus had to do many thingummies and ultimately see his brothers and sisters getting puked out alive. Gross. Shilpa Shetty shouldn’t have bought the winning team. Rajasthan Royals would have fared well so far without her. She can’t distinguish between IPL and Big Brother. (Though at times neither can I find much difference) Muthalik shouldn’t have been tempted with pink chaddis. Now he will unleash his fangs on pub goers again to get some more of the bright essentials, and them sell them to make himself cosy with a blooming chaddi business.

Moral of the stories: I should have studied hard to get the marks I hanker after. Then I wouldn’t have had to efface my Orkut account from the public world to save me from the impending embarrassment.

I rest my case.

End of a morbid past (perhaps)

2009-04-27T16:24:00.001+05:30

Ever since class nine, almost everyday my life at 2 pm would reduce to a bullock cart chase and then a ride on a huge jalopy with my arms swinging on the rods, perpendicular to each other. Had I looked different many would have considered me to be pole dancer doing her thing in a crowded bus. Bus route 235 had defined me quite well, it proved me that I am short and hence would have to carry out gymnastics and other stunts in front of bewildered co- passengers. For once the fact that I am thin paid me. I would be able to squeeze in between well-tiered aunties. I also had this obnoxious habit of thinking that someone was pinching from my bag when I would be inversely batting on the rod in a miraculously awkward position.

It also made me realise that the bus was the modern day wooing ground for all my school going desperate fellows. The rather cute chick would perch herself up on the seat; (these chicks would amazingly find seats in a crowded bus. Man, they were smart!) The lanky boy with a fair-and-handsome face and a goatish beard would stare wide eyed with a flossed smile while the girl would giggle gleefully till perpetuity. The boy would almost look like a salivating puppy. I wonder what they’d gawk at so much. But I guess they are just like me.

I have also been the victim of gallons of puke, not once but thrice. Nowadays I avoid sitting beside such perpetually excreting broods. And of course every single girl in the bus has been a victim to that clan of men who have an excessively uncontrollable libido and perennially ogling eyes, though I have not come under their scrutiny much mercifully, I’ve seen quite a few coming under the scanner. It must be some sort of a malady. They must have had very strict mothers when they were young and blooming and hence couldn’t do a bit of the thingummy that is so vital and indispensable for the budding men.

I would usually pass my time in the jalopy looking outside instead of taking note of my co-passengers like most do. My nonchalant attitude was often chastised by the conductors because I would ignore their calls for ticket. Most likely, my journey in 235 has come to an end. I am glad though I will miss the bus. It brought some excitement to my lackadaisical life. But then, I have this hunch that I will have to hop onto the same bus and go through this same process when I get into college.

An affair to remember :|

2009-04-20T12:16:00.002+05:30

Its always a trifle sad when a long- drawn famous affair comes to an end. Like, when Brad Pitt and Aniston broke up, the repercussions were felt by many, though mostly by Jolie. I have been having this little affair for the last three years and now finally the break- up has been concluded.

I have deleted my Orkut account. So I request you all to maintain one second of silence for this disaster that has struck my life.

wise-cracker

2009-04-19T11:25:00.001+05:30

Perfection is a Utopian ideal. You wake up, take a rather foamy bath in the tub singing ‘sonny boy’ like Bertie Wooster, or play with the old rubber duck, Take a leisurely hour choosing the right thing to wear, and gazing at the mirror to see where the tummy is at the present moment, and all is perfect. Till you get late for whatever that you are supposed to do, and then ultimately screw up the whole day, returning home groggy and tired and absolutely down and out.

For some other people like us, we jump out of the bed almost at the eleventh hour, cursing the provision for ‘snooze’ in the cell phone, have a bath that does nothing to take out the morning stink, counter it with lots of good deodorants, have a breakfast of assorted crumbs and leftovers, and we are on time, if not early, for whatever we are doing. In the end we return home as happy as a tipsy birdie, and enjoy life.

These words of wisdom were illustrated in my sister’s t-shirt. They are the new philosophers.

V.

2009-04-11T21:29:00.001+05:30

It’s customary that the death of all things evil must be celebrated with extra fervour. Even if you haven’t really killed the evil spirit, and even if it has committed its notorious crimes, its withering away must be fêted. It calls for an undying gusto to mark ones success for not letting the evil draw out your soul like a leech on a feeble body. It marks the triumph of not yielding to the mighty conqueror that sets upon the soil to drain life from its natives. The evil cages us into dark and damp cells from where we can never see a glimmer of hope, or conceive any desire that goes against the conventions. Our spirit is trapped and life reduces to a meaningless chase to oblivion, for in the end, even the best isn’t remotely good. To thwart this evil is almost impossible, as the action of exterminating itself prematurely shall give us harsher punishment. But the brave conquer it, without being afraid of its upshots. The fight is not for the weaklings.

Yes, exams are over. I have conquered it without losing any weight. And if you think that I am being over dramatic, then go and watch Prosenjit.

Shoe mantra

2009-04-07T12:42:00.003+05:30

After an unprecedented action taken by the Iraqi journalist who famously threw shoes at George Bush, the idea is being lifted and plagiarised a bit too often across the globe. A few minutes ago a very calm and composed P. Chindambaram turned out to be a victim of the shoe- game. The shoe was not aimed correctly and hence unlike the Bush stunt, it did not do anything to test Chidambaram's reflexes. But he dealt with it rather nicely, smiling and requesting the guards who took the man away, to treat him gently. A gentlemanly reception to a not- so benign action. Propagating the gandhigiri mantra, it'll make Munnabhai proud. But frankly speaking I couldn't see any reason why the shoe was hurled. But such actions lessen the significance of what happened in Iraq. I mean, shoes should be particularly reserved to hit the bird (brain) in the Bush. Anyway, such sights are always good fodder for entertainment. It has already become the breaking news of the channels, who are at a dilemma whether to show the shoe-hurling process or the press meet, and hence is showing both, that looks funny because they have "LIVE" written and it ostensibly seems that its raining shoes on the Home Minister. But I do wish it happened to Muthalik, shoe being replaced by something else; or Varun Gandhi or the likes. Chindambaram is one of those rare souls who are the saving graces of Indian politics. He speaks well and atleast looks honest. Now that is rare. But anyway, a rather entertaining press meet.

muddle syndrome

2009-03-23T19:54:00.006+05:30

Ever wondered what being truly happy is all about? We mortals have forgotten the art of being blissful. We languish for what we don’t have, and gradually life simmers down to grey patches of displeasure. And then, when we stand at the other side of Lethe; we question the true meaning of all that has passed…

All right I am not going to delve into all this philosophical and sentimental gaga. But to think of it, our typical teenage life has blatant streaks of complaints that will definitely seem hilarious to us when we’ll become grey and wise. It’s a manifestation of our perennial confusion, especially us girls. During examination time, if we don’t study, we definitely have a big problem. But if we do, then whether others are doing as well or not is a big question. If the others do better, great- we have to face an even greater hitch. If we’ve got hold of some good chic or guy (depending on our alignment) then there is some problem or the other bubbling amidst the coo chi cooing. If we are single, then all the people in love are blasphemous bird-brained dolts. If we have the requisite curves then we complain of the lecherous eyes of men (and girls like me). And if we don’t have the required stuff, then we crave for attention from the opposite chaps. When we look nice and fat we starve ourselves to become ultra- anorexic. If we are thin, and have the desired skeleton effect, we pine for some hormonal wonder that will make us fat. (Gosh this sentence made me emotional.) If we have curly hair on top, we spend zillions on straightening them, and if we have straight hair, then a few more bucks are spent to make them curly and all messed up around your face like some angel's black ghoulish halo. If we are good at something we feel proud of it, and the moment someone else seems better, we plunge into the abyss called inferiority complex. I tell you, us she-beings enjoy feeling inferior at times. Stupid us.

A friend says that women are confused bisexual beings. Confused, yes I agree. Bisexual? Then I am in the majority. (We’ll have to be bisexual in this world where men nowadays wax and pedicure and flaunt their chest-hairlessness in a manner as if their noble heart’s covering is as good as Yul Brynner’s helm. I tell you, all men on earth. We women are confused soul. For God’s sake and your own, stop behaving like us.)

Darn. See? Even I am so confused that I deviated from the topic and started chastising the chic-men.

Anyway, the point is that there's this masochistic desire to create problems even if we don't have any. May be without such problems life will be pathetically dull and dreary. Anyway... whatever. I guess you’ve got the hang of it.

P.S: This is NOT about me. but a general attempt at...err... generalisation :|

Disorientation

2009-02-11T19:43:00.004+05:30

I wonder if it happens to all- disorientation. We human beings are supposedly programmed to do certain things in certain ways, and when we choose the path less trodden, we get disoriented. I am not a bad egg. I mean I am not really hard boiled, am decent where pedagogic exhibitions are concerned, and usually enjoy studying ever since I gave up mathematics (I only use the basics of it while calculating money in such hard times). But as Doomsday is nearing, I am getting more and more disoriented with the basic thing that I am supposed to do now, day in and day out. Here are the few things that I usually do when I am supposed to be studying:

1. Transforming historically famous immortals into measly cartoons- Gandhi has been my supreme prey. Others include some A- one blokes of the famous type.

2. Nose- Picking. From the dawn of civilisation, man has excelled in the art of digging out the olfactory to his might. So have I. In the privacy of the washroom.

3. Weighing options- literally. In this day and age everyone wants to be size zero. So do I. I don’t really like my ‘size-negative’.

4. Eating- after thinking about point number three for sometime.

5. Calling up friends- the ones who don’t study with you are your true friends.
The family of a friend of mine does not allow her to go out for more than 10 minutes before relapsing into the bookworm syndrome. As for the rest of the chics I know, they are in as critical a situation as me.

6. Moo-sic- I can even listen to Himesh’s music if that keeps me from studying. What the heck- Himesh is a professional singer- Even Mamata didi’s patriotic croons are better than biting the dust… err, books
.
7. MTV Roadies- the miseries of the obnoxiously mutilated minds are fun to watch. The cat fights are side-splitting. And MTV airs roadies almost 24*7 so I can watch it anytime I want to. It’s always interesting to watch good looking femme fatales fighting it out amongst themselves for stupid looking sissies (also called boys)

8. Cooking- the way through a man’s heart is through his stomach, as they say. Since education isn’t proving to be my forte, I’d rather learn to do this. Will work wonders in the matrimonial columns (provided I get a plastic surgery first). Or else I will be able to open a roadside dhaba. Ah business in times of trouble!

9. Solving Sudoku- the more time it takes the better. And I console myself by saying that it is only helping me to develop my brain. Huh. As if I have one.

10. And the best way to constructively kill time when I am supposed to be mugging? HAVE A BLOG.

I rest my case.

Pseudography

2009-01-29T10:39:00.012+05:30

The furious sun sets on my disfigured soul. You and I are like the luminaries in the cosmos. But I am the dying star while you are gathering your flames to shine for aeons. Naively I had bequeathed to you my searing armour of life, and you had robbed me of it invidiously. (And since then your parents had to pay high electricity bills).

I’ve longed for you from the day we parted (when you were here, I longed for other people.) it was a gigantic blunder that I made. (I must have built the Titanic in my previous life) You are gone but your smell still lingers like a dark shadow (No axe affected.) Without you I am all alone in this murky and lackadaisical world. (Emo kids should be left there to rot anyway)

Trying to make a come-back to life, I fail miserably as each attempt reminds me of my failure and the loss it entailed. (No, I am not dev Anand.) I stagger back to the past that didn’t have you, though such a past was long gone by. Each moment spent in the dark hours of the eyes see your countenance. (In stark daylight, I can see the faces of better beings.)

Adrenalin conceives the desire to find you again. (But what if I have a hormonal problem?) Anticipation and despondency is entwined but then it was you who taught me to be a realist. Your love made me sink into feeling that this was ceaseless. And now that you are gone, you have taken with you my hopes and dreams, leaving behind only those that appear as phantasms in the darkest of hours (Too much influenced by Shehnaz Hussein.)

But what’s lost is lost. Us mortals have to face the consequences of what we do (Politicians are immortal). As I confront the future each day, the twine of the past pulls me back. And I remain as a mere puppet to the strings of your memory. (Being John Malkovich.)

Thought that a heart-break post would add glamour to my blog. But no one broke my heart. Hence the disaster :p (And I am a nincompoop. I can't even fake pseudo-intellectualism :| )

Look who's here again

2008-12-30T18:46:00.003+05:30

Life isn’t really a cakewalk. Everything goes fine until one day you suddenly face with one of those difficulties…

Exams. Yeah I have one again. They are like phantasmal nightmares that haunt you rather too often than one would want. And no matter how much time you’ve been given to prepare for it, the zeal for studying doesn’t really come two months before D- Day. The high rush of adrenalin, the enthusiasm to gulp down knowledge, the Ulysses like ultra- keenness is a myth. At least for me. I plan every day as to what I should do. And I then manage to do exactly what I shouldn’t. Life is such a drag. No matter what you do this Ultimate Source of Depression is always lurking there at the back of the mind. The whole thing is like a parasite. Exams are like leeches that suck out anything that is worth enjoying in this life. However, it’s true that sitting for an exam in the hall is rather enjoyable. One gets to see a plethora of people with diverse expressions. A friend of mine can often be seen wool-gathering in the first two hours. It’s the third hour that makes her grasp the fact that its do or die (do or fail, to be politically correct.) the principle of beg borrow and steal is implemented in every exam hall- beg and borrow pens, protractors and answers. The classroom is one big happy family... There's definitely more to this but my limited knowledge on the lingua franca isn't permitting me to pen (type) them down here.

So, as all have concluded by now, I am as usual frustrated with it. But then it’s only normal because getting frustrated at the slightest pretext is my trademark style. I really don’t mind examinations. Just wish that they didn’t test our mugging- up prowess.

Practising optimism ;)

2008-12-29T01:21:00.003+05:30

Its funny how one can feel nostalgic at the weirdest hours of the day. It’s almost 1 am and I am harassing the keyboard with my sudden splurge of sentimental gaga. Life itself is strange.

There has been so many times when we feel that we cannot face life anymore. The world suddenly shrinks into a narrow windowless room full of disgruntlement, as if the seething sadness is almost claustrophobic. The laughter that we shared echoes amidst the white pillars of ruins that we left. They hark back of times that aren’t ever to come back.

Time is too precious to let go of, but as each second passes by we lose it. I’d like to believe that we can ensnare time in a tiny corner of our brain, so that every little sign act as keys that can bring back those days as reminiscences. The world seems to come to a standstill as we come to the end of something. But hope allows us and our mind’s world to carry on. Life is too beautiful to just sit back with our memories. It hurls at us challenges that are the stepping stones of our growing up. Time can never give us anything decayed so we get fresh reasons of joy from life as we grow older.

When we'll look back, all our petty discontents shall look like mundane trials of patience, and almost comical. We might not crack the jokes that we cracked when we were younger, but we shall look back at those jokes with fondness, laugh at the thought that we could come up with such poor jargon and actually considered them to be worthy of our laughter. We might meet each other once in a blue moon. But then even blue moon is sure to occur once in three years. We might not be as hyper excited at most things as we were, but we’ll learn the flair of subtle passion. We’ll be excited all the same; just that the exposé of it shall be a tad bit different.

The whole thing isn’t exactly like a short story. The chapters are interlinked and thus when every chapter ends, the next carries forward with it something of the previous. So we aren’t really losing out on the whole thing as we come to the end of something. We have to give up on certain things, but then to gain something we must surrender a few. We can’t be forever the same, but can be forever young as we are now. Life is too beautiful to go on lamenting about the past- we have lived the past and can relive it anytime we want in our mind. The jubilant past is here with us in the present. We haven’t left anything behind. It’s there with us. It’s there with me. And I am not going to let go of it.

(err.. pardon me for my midnight blues. sleepiness must have made me do it. )

Change of Season

2008-12-27T12:52:00.004+05:30

My eternally over-wintered brain is seeing spring for some time now. Though it should have been ideally operational for the sake of my upcoming examinations, the Mumbai carnage plus the festive spirit did the honours instead of the thoughts of the Impending Doom of March. My mother is always at her freaky best- she was sure that I was going to get blown up if I visited Park Street on Christmas. (That’s going to happen on the day my result comes out anyway. And no it’s not about eat-and-get-bloated blown up thing. She has given up hoping for that, ages ago. She has now accepted the fact that she has given birth to a toothy skeleton.)

Footfall at the malls always increases during any festive season, mostly thanks to us shopaholic femmes. And since majority of the women in this planet have side-bags almost like Pandora’s Box, the security guards at each malls are supposedly at their hyper-best. The television media has also wakened up from the quiescent state. 26/11 has given them a decent Breaking News at last. So it’s continuing even now. A certain bong channel has also started keeping unattended bags in crowded areas to check the citizen’s and police’s alertness. Both the targeted victims failed miserably to identify and complain about the suspicious thing. Though such acts test the alertness level and pre-warn about potential dangers, I found such hoaxes rather funny.

26/11 has changed life for many quite a bit. It even changed the spelling of the Bong- Didi’s name. For some nothing much has changed- their food for life is the primary concern. The Great- Social- Divide is all the more glaring. I don’t remember being so concerned about the Malegaon case, Assam Blasts or the perpetual mayhem in Kashmir. Attack on the Parliament became an ‘attack against Democracy’ while other attacks were sidelined as sporadic cases not worth all the media hullabaloos. Attack on Taj made a certain renowned reporter write about his memories there that coincided with the birth of his son while the 56 dead at CST was not given much footage in comparison. Certain things never change.

As for me, I’ll now wait to watch Shrek.