Sunday, December 26, 2010

Eddie #2 - Pin the Tail

(Xo and Xo are working in the lab. At least one of them is.)

Xo: (whispering into Xo's ear) What color is your bra today?
Xo: We're working.
Xo: Answer me!
Xo: Yes. No. Not Often. Yesterday. Mars. -- Want more?
Xo: What?
Xo: Answers.
Xo: (unfazed) What color bra are u wearing today?
Xo: I'm not telling you.
Xo: Is it black?
Xo: No.
Xo: Is it red? :D
Xo: Certainly, not.

(a couple minutes pass in silence as he stands behind her and plays with her hair)

Xo: What happened? Did u again forget what the other colors are called?
Xo: It's not black or red. So I'm not interested anymore.

(And
Xo walks away fiddling with his pen)

Monday, December 20, 2010

Eddie, my Eddie

As they love putting it, Eddie came with just a head .. For those who are not familiar with Eddie or "they", i'm talking about the legendary death metal band Iron Maiden and their mascot Eddie .. One can know more about Eddie here


Eddie appears in the background in each and every concert of IM and on almost all their album covers. Now, as a girl i'm normally expected to be fond of soft toys, dolls and the like. I, however, thoroughly dislike them. But eddie is one character who has a special place in my heart.

This will be a new series titled Eddie and dedicated to him; an attempt at comedy, quaint as my sense of humor is.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EDDIE by Ken

Acknowledgments
Iron Maiden --Their music is fried chicken for my soul.
All the great men I've known, esp Ka.

--

#001 - My way or the highway

[Xo and Xo have been together for 6 years out of which they've lived together for 2 years. Both are physicists, atheists, metal fans. That's all you need to know for now.]

Xo: You're going out?
Xo: Yes .. My college reunion party
Xo: Don't go
Xo: Er .. ohhhk ....
Xo: i love this new lipstick
Xo: Errr .. why .. should ...
Xo: lipstick? oh .. party? Cos i dont want you to
Xo: you're going to--
Xo: the supermarket.
Xo: I ll drive you then
Xo: You stay at home.
Xo: Why can't i go to the party???
Xo: Cos we just decided you are staying home. Pay attention, Xo. tsk tsk

[
Xo puts on a pretty skirt and walks out of the bedroom. Xo flops over the bed exasperated]


Sunday, November 21, 2010

One of many others

It's one of those days when u don't mind being unproductive days. Lying on my bed all day, reading a little, watching a few episodes of classic FRIENDS and listening to a few good songs.
In fact, the only activity worth mentioning is watching a herd of goat/sheep grazing and lazing about on open grassy grounds as i sat on my bed, eating cake and looking outside the window. It was amusing to see how some ate furiously, few sat down with no care in the world and the few other sheep wandered about aimlessly. They all looked so dumb.
I finished reading the book Vertigo by Ashok Banker for the third time. A really beautiful book.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Social Contract

"Social Contract" itself screams sarcasm, doesn't it? Human beings, by nature, are claimed to be social beings yet we have comfortably coined a contract that is set to regulate and supervise a face of human nature, which ideally should be spontaneous and uninhibited.

The world, in my opinion, would be far less complicated. How many times have you wished that an acquaintance just got straight to the point where he/she asks you for a favor without putting u thru mind-numbing exchanges of pleasantries? How many times i have wished that people just dropped the plastic smiles covering up their (sometimes illicit) agenda.

Many people i know follow the social contract almost unconsciously, like it were hard-wired into them. Can we think out of the box from time to time? Why do most of us so placidly dismiss simplified living that comes without the unnecessary layers to a very very teary onion?

I urge people to be more straight-forward, cut all the crap n trash talk and approach a person upfront with what you originally intend to. I believe you can come across as too strong or even impolite the first time but consequent interactions shall undo any damage done and may even bring you more respect than plastic smiles ever could.

--

I don't know if i made any sense in the above post. All the same, i'm a no-nonsense person, even if this post proves otherwise.

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Ten Words

Today afternoon, i just typed out ten random words as they came to me .. no cognitive process involved .. They are as: Ink blue, bad, hickey, outlaw, barn, vintage, scaffold, godfather, independent
G came up with: coral reef, kissing, machines obse, nails, shoes, ice cream, wet grass, money, pacman, books.
Pr came up with: God, drums, adler, sexy, fuck, jeans, underwear, nook, relax, bottle, pee, hard drive ##clean towel, wilson, space, fluctuation, shock, blast, collide, explode,combine, recover, head-on, nicaragua##

I don't know why i came up with this 'game' .. kinda fun tho .. Lately i've been oddly reading up on political strategies and latest is the concept of 'false flag' .. i picked up the interest from massive attack's "False Flags" .. Beautiful track .. Lyrics are as:

In city shoes
Of clueless blues
Pays the views
And no-mans news
Blades will fade from blood to sport
The heroin's cut these fuses short
Smokers rode a colonial pig
Drink and frame this pain i think
I'm melting silver poles my dear
You bleed your wings and then disappear
The moving scenes and pilot lights
Smithereens have got 'em scaling heights
Modern times come talk me down
And battle lines are drawn across this town
Parisian boys without your names
Ghetto stones instead of chains
Talk 'em down cause it's up in flames
And nothing's changed
Parisian boys without your names
Riot like 1968 again
The days of rage yeah nothing's changed
more pretty flames
In school i would just bite my tongue
And now your words they strike me dumb
The flags are false and they contradict
They point and click which wounds to lick
On avenues this christian breeze
Turns its heart to more needles please
Our eyes roll back and we beg for more
It frays this skin and then underscore
The case for war you spin and bleed
The cells you fill screensavers feed
The girls you breed the soaps that you write
The graceless charm of your gutter snipes
The moving scenes and suburbanites
And smithereens got 'em scaling heights
Modern times come talk me down
The battle lines are drawn across this town
English boys without your names
Ghetto stones instead of chains
Hearts and minds and u.s. Planes
Nothing's changed
And english boys without your names
Riot like the 1980's again
The days of rage yeah nothing's changed
More pretty flames

--



Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Indians, movies, books.

Note: I mean no offense when I refer to Indians as “they” on occasions in the following post. The reason is simple: I’ve had an identity crisis for as long as I remember which has been made possible by my contrasting outlook, beliefs, interests and character.

--

Movies have always had a very special niche carved out in most Indians’ hearts. I say ‘most’ because I’ve raised eyebrows each time I admit movies are only as special as a blue sky, thus making me a slightly tasteless exception.

Research for this post goes as deep as extracts from casual conversations I’ve had with my parents and grandparents as they shared their experiences as a young and growing individual. Movies, as I see, have influenced the Indian audience for several decades now. My mother speaks of lover peers of hers, who after watching a certain Hindi movies, the titles of which I do not remember, committed suicide jumping off cliffs, into waterfalls etc, all in their undying desire to be eternally bound by love (and may I add, stupidity).

We, Indians, by nature constantly swim in and out of reveries because reality, more often than not, chooses to be less than pleasant. Recalling from my own experience, one week into college, a friend’s friend woefully disclosed her disappointment at having ended up in a dull, uneventful institute. A little inquiry by us led to her telling us, “I thought life at an engineering college would be like the one in ‘Happy Days’.Happy Days is a telugu movie which was a huge hit with the south Indian audience. The movie captures a very pleasant picture of a bunch of freshmen who fall in and out of love among themselves, set in a pretty-looking engineering college. Anyone who’s studied in an engineering college in India how totally fantastic the movie is. On the contrary, Indian engineering institutes are delightful if you have a taste for dark humor, sarcasm, irony and randomness.

I’ve never watched a movie starring Rajnikanth but in India, he is as well known as the Taj Mahal or tandoori chicken. Indian actors, once catapulted into lasting limelight enjoy a never-failing safety net in the form of a direct entry to politics. Actors who haven’t any more knack or knowledge on this topic than an unnamed professional, go on to get elected to the office of the state and later, to the parliament.

A casual questioning shows that the ratio of the number of people who prefer movies to books is heavily lopsided towards the former category. Let me present my completely amateur, unproven theory as to why. Watching movies is just easier than reading a book. There are only so many Nancy Drew and Sidney Sheldon novels that u can finish reading in under three hours. But the ‘time’ factor isn’t really a factor observing how Indians lead a relatively leisurely life; a claim supported by the undying love and loyalty they harbor for cricket, an annoyingly long sport, being made shorter as years roll on, in an effort to make it pass for a global sport.

So moving on, books require considerably more gray matter to effectively process the substance they hold. But movies or for that matter any motion picture or visual aid is impressed upon one’s mind requiring relatively less effort from the individual as compared to the written word. Books require their readers to read the text, process and grasp the meaning, imagine the setting by mapping the words and their implication to visual cues stored in their brains, until, at last, the reader is able to convert the words into a motion picture inside their respective heads, which most people will agree, by experience, is more ‘real’ than watching a series of fast-moving picture frames.

All this led me to think how different or not different would the common Indian be if he/she read more books, even if it’s only a decent fraction of the number of movies he/she watches. Honestly, no one in my immediate family reads books on a regular basis. This piece of fact in addition to showing my family doesn’t have bookworms hidden away, also shows that qualifying an Indian by education or a decent profession can in no way raise the chances of him/her being a fan of the written word.

When we know, as a general fact, that education for sure develops a country, there’s also the fact that education can only go so far as teaching a person to identify and learn to use his talents and abilities. Who/ what, then, is to take care of the constant necessity to sustain the creative skills and to exercise the imagination centre of the Indian mind? It’s general knowledge that every organ, including the brain, atrophies if left unused for long periods of time. I do not imply that any Indian who doesn’t exercise his brain enough will terminate into an incapacitated vegetable but isn’t a part of us lost -- a talent/ skill with a potential to bring what man desires most: wealth, power, fame, happiness? (I used to draw appreciably well years ago before I stopped drawing. Now, my best ‘face’ on paper doesn’t even faintly resemble that of a human being.

It is a growing concern for me personally as I observe how uninspiring bulks of today’s Indian movies are. A couple decades ago, making a movie was an achievement in itself. Good movies stood as an epitome to human perseverance, resilience, dedication, toil and calculated risk. Whereas now, movies get made with a flimsy screenplay, good-looking faces christened ‘actors’, corporate firms funding the artless project just because the CEO/ proprietor wants to satisfy his whims. The tragedy doesn’t end here; Indians uphold very such movies and ditch the less ostentatious yet artful ones. In a stark and cruel contrast, writers still have only their pens to win them a publisher and hoping to find the right editor in whose heart their writing will strike a chord.

I accept trash movies get made all over the world but only in India do they have a sickly sweet stranglehold over the audience and only here do they afflict a delirium so convincing, it is so often misinterpreted as delight.

--

A long post indeed.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

I am Grateful

A Not so beautiful Tuesday morning. I get ready for college. Start for the bus stand. Sit in the bus. The bus starts. Time to buy a ticket. I start tearing my bag apart. Why ? Because i cannot find my frickin purse !

People always keep asking me why i don't maintain a purse and go around stashing money in four to five arbit places within my bag. I thought over this and got myself a tidy little black purse from home. I remember how meticulously i put in loose change into it today morning. And damn ! How i cursed myself for even paying heed to those idiots who gave me the "maintain a purse" advice. And then i remembered -- this is the fuckin reason why i never maintain a purse unless i'm on a formal outing. Because, of all the things that i usually take to places, i know i ll end up forgetting this one thing !!

I was still tearing my notebooks apart when the couple sitting next to me noticed i was going crazy. When they heard i had forgotten my purse, they offered to pay for my ticket. 7 rupees. Gawd and i was able to fish out 2 bucks from my now disheveled bag. I decided it would be too cheap to give the 2 rupees to them. So i clutched it tight in my fist till it became almost as hot and flushed as my face !

Sincerely, I thank you, Mr & Mrs. XyZ. (i was too embarassed to ask your names)

But the cynical, ungrateful, bitchy me couldnt help thinking -- If i was not dressed as i was, or if i was not carrying doesn't-come-cheap electronic gizmo or if i was not wearing those diamond rings on my fingers, i wonder if they'd deem my unfortunate mishap genuine and help.
Damn my impudence

Monday, January 25, 2010

A Proud Pessimist

In a sweet but angry exchange, one of my close friends today said, "Don't be such a pessimist."

I was not offended at all. I hadn't thought out that label till now but i think i like it. It fits me. I'm gonna talk a little about myself today. Let's see how i came to earn this label. First things first, i don't trust people or even dogs, for that matter. But i always thought it'd be more fun that way -- keeping your senses sharp for any anomaly. Helped me in a huge way over the years. I'm what .. 19 now ? And i'm comfortably happy.

Pessimism, as i see it, is not a bad thing. It spells trouble only when u begin to anticipate breaking your leg on ur way to the kitchen. Pragmatic Pessimism is something i'd prefer. I did a little reading and found there is nothing as 'pragmatic pessimism' .. only 'pragmatic optimism'

Are people so devoid of real-time happiness in their lives that while they're scared to be stupid (optimistic), they want to rationalize things by prefixing a 'pragmatic' ? .. Which is why i find more truth in pragmatic pessimism: where u are practical (which is ALWAYS better than the worst) but the fact that things will turn out worst-possible will always run at the back of your mind. If u have learned to control your calm, i don't see why not employ a few more grey cells to keep track of the possible worst.

You're now wondering my definition of "pragmatic" is laced with optimism which i plan to trash anyway ? I thought that too. But then practical-pragmatic is weighing the nice-bad logically, right ? A how screwed can anyone's real-time chances get ?

What did i get out of being pessimistic pragmatically ? I can choose to be indifferent / vulnerable. Believe me, those two mental states dictate most of ur emotions. I like myself, this way .. i think

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Either Or

Today i removed the page element which provided links to blogs my friends kept. Most of them had either deleted his / her blog or stopped updating. I don't understand why. Lol .. May be i'm too jobless that i keep a regular blog ?

I am a cow

Happened a couple days ago. 7 30 am. On my way to the bus stand. calm, clear morning. I'm all fresh with just washed, still wet hair. I'm walking along the roadside (there's no pedestrian pavement). Out of nowhere, i hear the blaring horn of a motorbike speeding up the road.

The road was 10ft wide and i was off the tarmac ! .. The fucker would blow the horn till he reached the next corner .. WTF .. And i starting wondering if i was a cow .. If u haven't guessed, i ll tell u why

The horn originally fit in vehicles so as to help easy navigation when drivers came across stray animals or animal crossing. A loud horn would scare the poor farm animal off into the oblivion hence clearing the road for the vehicle. But in India, the horn serves any function but that. We here have 1000s of different horns to fit the owner's personality. Hence a motorbike can sound like a truck charging and a truck sounds like it's got ten horns mounted all being blown at once !

What did the fucking biker think when he came down the street blowing the horn ? Did he expect me to just fly and vanish into thin air the moment i saw him coming ? Or did he think i would jump right into the middle of road cos i was unusually fond of hurting myself in automobile accidents !

So much has this issue progressed that average, non-thinking citizens of India no more respond to horns. A bunch of ppl might be walking in the middle of the road and 20 seconds of blowing a horn gives u about a 40% chance that they ll turn around and move out of the way ! Wonderful, don't u agree ?

Where will this stop ? .. How much louder do they intend to make the horns ? Till majority of the population is deaf ? And since "cow" features in the post's title itself, let me tell u something very interesting about these meek, dumb creatures : When in India, u spot a cow lurking on / along a road, ur best chance to get around / past it is by NOT blowing a horn because if u do, the cow ll stand still till ur 2 seconds away from it and then it ll mostly stick it's hip or it's head outside just so it can get blood on ur bonnet / windshield.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

"We'd rather do porno"

No. I did not say that. Here's what happened - Lab got over. It was 5'o clock and the lab teach was done picking on me :) .. I head out n shed my coat only to done my pathetic dupatta. As s and r watch, i mutter, "If any one of u becomes the vc someday, please ban dupattas. Good for us (girls) and good for you (boys)."

But they weren't gonna let go easily.
R : No way ! .. i wouldn't become the vc even they begged me to.
Me : So, u don't wanna be rich ?
S : There are better ways to get rich. Not like this !
R : Yeah .. you're right .. We could feature in a porno movie than become the vc.
[ S shows no reaction. So i'm genuinely puzzled. But turns out he hasn't listened to what R had just rattled out]
Me : S, did u even hear what he just said ??
R : I said, we could feature in a porno than become the vc

S's face, now, becomes so grotesque, it's beyond embarrassment. The discussion prematurely ends with s and me asking r to shut up. But i think r would've wanted to discuss which female artists they should include in the movie. As far as i'm concerned, i'm happy that r didn't want s n him co-starring. Phew

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Almost Worthless. Almost.

Real Date: July 16, 2011.

Today, in fact until a few minutes, i wanted to die. I've mentioned before that my desire to live life exceeds everything else. Today it didn't. Today the reason was the memory of my mother; The only person whose life i actually affect, affect it enough to make me love her as much as i do.


I'm fat and ugly at times but she continues to love me.
There have been times when i hurt her, really bad but she continues to love me.
There have been times when she hurt me, real bad but i continue to love her.

Last time she recalled how when i was born to her, i was the most beautiful and smartest and not to forget, the most responsive doll she'd ever been presented with. She took it as her life's goal to educate me, to enlighten me, to strengthen me in a world which largely enervates you.

I cried after reading "The French Lover" by Taslima Nazrin. I felt so bad for the mother in the book. I go out of my way to not ever treat my mother that way. I'm not always successful; For all those times, i'm so sorry. I love you, mamma. Love you truly. You saved me again, today. Muax :)



It's because of her i have dreams today, i aspire to live life; She introduced me to the concept of ambition and living life. She's seen a lot in her life; It's so uncanny that i'm able to smell her aloo parathas right now even though she's miles and miles away from me. Today the group of kids she's trained to dance for a folk song are performing today. She sounded happy today. I love it when she's happy. I love my mother.

About the title, it's about my life.


Thursday, January 7, 2010

Glow

I really don't understand how 18+ year olds derive any pleasure by putting up foolishly optimistic quotes. one went like, " Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." .. Aren't we too smart to be taken by power quotes like these .. I wonder why people are so afraid of being practical. Take crap as it comes without sugar-coating it.