Four unrelated paragraphs...

I can hear the drone of my refrigirator. Distinctly. At 3 am you usually can. Unless you're in Mandaveli, right behind a petrol pump that stays awake for the lorry drivers who never sleep. But I've heard they sleep some times while driving. Placing a brick on the accelerator to avoid the labor of stepping on it while dozing off. Where i live right now, i can choose to hear it's cries any time of the day. I think it cries a little more loudly than it's peers out of emptiness. One unfilled and unfulfilled fridge mine is, holding just beer and the occasional stale food that never get's consumed. I need to throw out a 3 week old red fluid i bought at a Thai place. I forgot it's name. It tasted terrible. I was in an adventurous mood. I am usually the kind who goes to the same place and orders the same things. I should stick to my tenets.

**************

When you see a skeleton, do you wonder about the person the skeleton used to be? I didn't hear much of what Mangala miss told us at the Bio lab that afternoon a million years ago. My head was filled with thoughts of the person's life and how he died and how he ended up at the Bio lab of our high school. I did hear the part where she said the person was a smoker. Can you get that from a skeleton? Or may be she made it up to sneak in a moral science lecture on why smoking is bad, without actually giving that lecture. You show a skeleton to a 7th grader, and tell him the skeleton used to smoke, that would keep him off cigarretes for a good many years. I wasn't much of a student for most parts. I don't remember when exactly the turnaround happened. Not the rags to riches turnaround, but more of a rags to middle class turnaround. Maybe after i started taking TT lessons. Or after i failed in Chemistry in 9th grade and Baby miss formed 2 groups of 'weak' students and put them under the tutelage of a couple of the elite. I remember taking it as a personal insult, and studying for the next Chemistry exam furiously. I didn't top it, but i got much more than what a pass needed. And i have no freaking clue why i have think about it now.

**************

What makes people pee on their past, or convince themselves that they don't belong there and those who still belong there come from another planet? If you had run through college drinking tea from that 2 rupees per cup tea shop, served specially with dipped fingers, and can't bring yourself to go back there and do the same, a part of you has died. And that's not such a good thing.

**************

I am heading home in a month. Again. Taking a two month vacation. Part of the time shall be spent finding out if yoga or ayurveda can do the magic to my neck and shoulders that Cortisone shots and chiropractors couldn't. Another part of it would be spent on a Delhi->Manali->Ladakh->Kashmir->Delhi bike trip. Assuming my neck and shoulder get good enough for that. Else i might do the same route on whatever moving thing i can get myself on to. At the end of it i guess i'll resume writing code.

...

Relationships are never symmetric. Even the seemingly rosy ones. If A can give up her career for B, B can possibly give up a bottle of unrefrigerated Coca Cola. But that is when you get there. In the run up to getting that equation going, or not going, you'd be, in no particular order, a buffoon, a hero, a wreck, a bore, a sweetheart, a schmuck, among so many other things you can't put a word to. You could do 323 times 47 without needing a calculator, but around the object of your affection your mind would be as functional as a plate full of mashed potatoes. You may not be particularly uninteresting. Even rarely funny in some circles. But suddenly you’d inspire as much interest as an Assamese movie would, at 1:30 pm on DD on a sleepy Sunday afternoon. The trick is in not trying. It is quite ironical actually.

But we can’t let an unnamed relationship be, can we? We want to pick it up and seal it in a bottle. We want to seal it in a bottle, stick a label on it, and give it a name. We can't just be happy with someone here and now. We want a promise of all the tomorrows. Of course this is all rhetorical. Do anthropologists study how and when humans started defining form and structure and rules to something that seems fairly amoebic?

Ok, I think I should stick to drinking vodka and writing gibberish...

In general life updates, i did a month and a half long trip to India at the end of which Buddha showed me the finger and asked me to think for myself. He probably got pissed because i went and met Bahubali at Shrawanabelahola and didn't go to Saranath. It was an awesome trip with a wee bit of travel and some moments that i'd cherish for a long time to come...

Anyways happy 2010 you folks...For me 2009 was fairly lousy, so this year better be good!...

The boiled egg that was never eaten...

It is 3 am. And i've been drinking vodka and watching 'Lost in translation'. I drank it out of a really tall glass meant for beer. I could've used an ever-silver tumbler. Does alcohol react with ever-silver? But if it is ever-silver it has to be ever silver no? I want to wear a silly yellow t-shirt. Inside out. And dance with Scarlette Johansson. I am thinking of Japan. The crowded Shinjuku station. The pretty girls in white skirts who hand out pamplets that say Massage but mean many other things. The Big Budha sitting at peace at Kamakkura. The people who are always running. The boss who is present when you reach office. And when you leave office. The slot machine attached to the hotel room's TV where you insert 100 yens to get 10 minutes of porn. The laptops in the platforms of Akihabara, and the cigarrette lighters shaped like fire extinguishers. The Buddhist temples, where you wash your feet before going in, and write your wishes in white pieces of paper and tie them up for Budha to read them and bestow upon you what you want. You could buy some corn, have them in your palm, and stretch your hand out for pigeons to peck on them. But remember to wear gloves. Pigeon beaks would be nicer to you then. I didn't. I saw glimpses of the country today, and want to go. I took a picture of half an egg, boiled a week ago and neglected since. The yellow is not yellow any more and the white is a very sad cream. I placed it in a shiny black bowl and placed the bowl on the wooden floor of my kitchen. So that the picture could have the yellow that is not yellow any more, the sad cream, the shiny black, and the ply wood brown. The picture came out very ordinary. I then threw the egg in my trash can. And emptied the contents of my trash can onto a bigger trash can outside my flat. Tomorrow the bigger trash can would be emptied into an even bigger trash can in a lorry that comes by. I don't know what happens after that. Have you seen 'The lady killers'? I will go sleep now. I need to get up and find out why, of 10 frames, 5 are going on port 1 and 5 on port 2, whereas 6 are supposed to go on port 1 and 4 on port 2. It is very important. No seriously.

God Goats Humans Kids

B takes his son to St.Thomas mount. That's a small hillock in chennai where St. Thomas was allegedly killed. There is a church built by the portuguese at the summit. And there is this tall, fiarly imposing statue of a Golden colored Jesus. So B's son sees people praying to the statue and asks B if he could too. B agrees. So the kid apparently brings his palms together, in standard Hindu prayer style, and tries to reach out to Jesus with a non-silent 'Gajaananam Bootha ganaathi saevitham'* shloka**! :). Funny and profound, no?

I don't know if Jesus or Ganesha had gotten confused, but adult humans are certainly a confused lot. In the context of the above incident, the basis of a lot of recent ill happenings seem ridiculous.In 'The unbearable lightness of being', Milan Kundera says that how someone treats those weaker to him/her determine's his/her niceness. He goes on to say that the human race is pretty much screwed up going by the way it treats animals. He talks about a more powerful species (hypothetical) coming in and treating us the way we treat, say, hens and goats and rats and guinea pigs, or something to that effect. 'Half a kilo boy meat, preferably thigh piece', someone from that species could say. Or use 20 year old women as 'guinea pigs' for untried drugs. Their biology classes could include dissection of 3 year olds to understand the human digestive system. Morbid, no? But we have Darwin, Survival of the fittest, Food cycle, Food web et al to explain the whole thing. OK, i could use some LSD now.

Anyways, all trash aside, the image of a kid saying 'Gajananam' to Jesus atop St.Thomas mount seems idyllic, and brings a smile. On that note, happy 2009 people.

*Shloka - A sanskrit hymn...
*Gajaananam - A shloka on Lord Ganesha...

Random post, I can't bring myself to post a post without a title...

The above pic is an entry to Cuckoo's topic for the month, 'Lonely'. A leafless tree/shrub standing alone in a barren stretch always evokes that emotion in me. This was taken during a trek to Kumara Parvatha (that's the second tallest peak in Karnataka, next to Muliyangiri).

It is June and I am still in chennai. Visa gods are refusing to smile. I've been living in a state of transit for way too long. So, instead of waiting for life to happen in Bay area, i thought i should get on with life in chennai. If and when the move happens it'll happen. I read somewhere, forgot whose quote it is, but it goes something like this: 'No matter how far you travel, at the other end you'll find yourself'.

I re-joined the place i used to play Table tennis in. In a couple of weeks i should be playing in the state ranking circuit. It's been a while since i played competitive. Looking forward to seeing familiar faces. If i manage one top-16 finish by the end of the season i'll be more than happy. I think i am happiest playing some sport and being involved in some kind of physically exerting pursuit. In Amit's terminology, playing improves my body's serotonin levels (that's some happiness associated chemical...and Amit is this doctor guy i met at NIM who insists on giving a technical explanation to every mood swing, and his body apparently produces serotonin most when he is climbing in the himalayas :).

Does anybody watch the 'Lok Sabha' channel. It is one of those Dordarshan channels with viewership probably limited to places that are dependent on a Panchayat owned Television airing only DD channels. Anyways, they show these films made by FTII Pune's diploma students and movies that NFDC sponsors and the like. They're all so beautifully made. Like yesterday they showed this short film called 'Saanj' by someone called Jasmine Kaur. It was about this senile old man living alone and a young guy and a girl living next door trying to reach out. It was so beautifully shot and so sensitively done. And almost every movie or short film screened there touches a chord. Probably because of the honesty to story-telling that comes with being a student whose objective is the creation itself and not the returns it fetches. If you get the channel, watch it.

May has come and gone and i am yet to take the year's quota of break. Work scene is not pretty. Hoping to get away by June end or early July, at least for a week. Will do the 'Valley of flowers' trek or do Vaishno Devi, Dal lake and the Taj. Need to do some major 'pulling up socks' act before that to get over the deficit accrued over a listless work phase. Fingers crossed.

Where i tell you i am this regular average bloke in a roundabout fashion...

When the desire to board a train, any train, ticket in hand, bag on the shoulders, and no destination in mind, overwhelms the need to be engaged in the regular chore of writing code to make data frames travel from point A to point B (which, for most parts, would help random people download porn faster), the reality of having to pay EMI for the concrete piece that i've collected for myself, tilts the scales and decides things for me. How the fuck did i bring this upon myself?

Ok, i am being dramatic. I had said this some time ago. But last year i had taken a month's break. By the 4th week i was itching to write code, fix bugs, attend meetings and all that. I realized, for me, work gave a better illusion of purpose than climbing mountains or wandering. And a notion of being purposeful is important to be happy, no? Anyways, once this big existential question had been addressed, and i knew i'll continue to be overpaid for some time atleast, i decided to give in to the easier of my mom's two long pending requests, the 'Why don't you buy a home' one. That we were ousted from our previous home by the landlord helped too. I now owe HDFC a lot of money. And i own a home some 200 metres from the Thiruvanmiyur beach. Feels scary. Feels nice. I feel secure. I feel bogged down.

Meanwhile Mani has quit his job. Pooja quit her's a while ago. And they are on the road on a Thunderbird, indefinitely. I'll try and enjoy their travels, vicariously. And maybe visit them for weekends once in a while. Yep, thats more like it. Mad work schedules interspersed with short breaks and travels, and a Himalaya darshan for the summer (deciding between Nepal and Sikkim this year). Taking a vacation suits me better than living one i guess...

Waaththa fuck...

Otha. Pronounced as Oaththa or Waaththa. Depending on conditioning. It is a tamil word that translates to 'Fuck'. Emitting this word loudly calms me a bit. The english equivalent doesnt. But where i come from it is considered cool to say 'Fuck'. Cooler if you say it aloud. And way cooler if there are women around and you announce you dont care. But you say 'Otha', you are a lungi wearing truck driving lecherous pervert. I dont have anything against lungi wearing. Or truck driving. But i might have something against lecherous perverts. So if someone thinks i am one i wont like it. This has had some serious repercussions. Around here, kids are brought up to beleive "Man saying Otha = Very bad man". And going by last year's opinion-pool, men kindof grow out it, but women dont. So basically my chances of hitting it off with with any tamil-knowing girl were ruined. Same applies for non-tamil-knowing girls who know tamil-knowing girls (cos tamil-knowing girls tend to protect non-tamil-knowing girls from 'Very bad men'). That pretty much covers all the girls in my RADAR. And i hold this and only this fully responsible for my singularity :). Now you see my problem. Tch tch...

ps: If i find a otha-emitting girl i'll pursue her unto death...

pps: Is this problem local to just tamil. I mean if you're a telugu speaking guy and you shout out 'Dhengu' (that's telugu for 'Fuck'), and the girl you might probably fancy is in the vicinity, would she think of you as anything more than scum (atleast to start with) ?