Snatch

Yesterday I watched Snatch for the fifth time and could not stop myself from falling off the chair laughing.
My God! Its so funny!
I now HAVE to get hold of Guy Ritchie's other movie..."Lock stock and two smoking barrels".

Ho Hum....

This is the toughest thing about writing a blog. Figuring out its title.
So Ho Hum...

I have not posted in a long while (as if anyone is waiting with bated breath..) because one fine morning, I got up, yawned, rubbed my eyes, padded over to my study and turned the computer on. My nostrils were refreshed by a smell of burning plastic. Turns out that the SMPS of my computer decided to throw the towel in. One DAEWOO chip in it is all black.
Looks like getting another SMPS is going to be much more painless than hunting for that elusive chip. Now since my proactiveness in household matters is legendary, the box in my study has been lying as a box for the last month or so.
Meanwhile I have had fun. Went to Kerala (beautiful place...will write about it sometime when I decide to put all my travelogues online...), went to Delhi for a whirlwind trip (My! How thin have you become ....exclaimed Mummy....and then she promptly let a barber loose on my hair which had just decided to form itself into a pony-tail-like shrub) and had an even more whirlwind trip to Hyderabad.
Also, I got roomies to relieve my loneliness.....a whole hive of bees. I have been at my wits' end as to how to regain my loneliness back!

This is rather funny. For a fortnight before that fateful morning, I had been flitting all around India and Bangalore. The only thing I did at home was catch a nap before hopping off elsewhere. So I get this morning free. I wake up, stretch myself, pick up a book (Icon..Steve Jobs' biography) and walk over to my study balcony. I hunch over the railing and start reading. A bee whizzes by my face angrily, I recoil only to find a HUGE hive not six inches from where my head had been.... That balcony has been an out-of-bounds area since then. If you are reading this and are a well-wisher, just pray that I can get someone who will break that hive and let me loose on that balcony again.....

Ciao

orkut.....

Just checked into orkut. The daily fortune told me that I will inherit a lot of money.
Please God, I don't want to inherit a lot of money. It implies that someone is going to die......
Been loafing around orkut. There is this poor girl in M.S. Ramaiah College who has an orkut profile showing nude pictures as well as a community called "....... lovers". The "...." was for her name which I would not like to divuge. You get into the community and there are discussions about how much she charged for various favours.
This is plain harassment!!!! Someone should put a stop to this!
Besides there are these tremendous bores.
You find one profile with a decent looking photo. You check out her profile and you find dozens of frustrated souls asking her to be their "fren"
God!!! Guys get a life! There are better ways of finding a girl.
But girls are no exception to this. A friend of mine has a nice profile and every once in a while he has to turn down friend requests from girls he does not know. It gets rather tiresome. You ask them who they are and they of course don't reply. This poor guy once put his cell number on line. This girl adds him. He wonders about it but accepts. A scrapping game begins. Finally one fine evening when he was really busy, our lady calls and pains him repeatedly. The poor fellow had no clue what hit him when he heard lines like "I am coming over to Bangalore. Don't disappoint me, I thought we had something going." Since he had his parents' phone number also online, he promptly removed all phone numbers from his profile and now only accepts friend requests from people he knows.........
God! This is harassment!
If anyone is reading this....please leave orkut clean and fun!

By the way...

This blog started out as a travelogue. The initial intention was to keep it that way. Since I keep making a lot of trips, I decided it would be a nice way for me to record all my trips and keep them for posterity (Man!!! Do I use big words..)
I have been sadly lacking in that respect. After the Bandipore trip, I took a lot of trips which I have not recorded..... Sakleshpur, Pondicherry, Savanadurga, Coorg.
Now Hetul has been pestering me to put down atleast the Coorg trip. It was one of the most fun trips I have had......
If anyone has been reading these idle thoughts of an idle fellow, please be patient. The Coorg trip deserves a decent travelogue and will get it in good time....

On the therapeutic effects of heavy metal....

Rock has always been a part of me. Starting from Bryan Adams (off a cassette which my bro bought and I stole..) to Rammstein, ACDC, Green Day that I listen to these days.
Many people have been responsible for giving this gift to me. My brother, Brijendar, Madhu (school-time buddies), Chiro, Sid, Shiraj, Arnab Chaks....etc...
These days when I sit and mope in front of my PC and look at the list of people who have checked out my profile recently (all of them entirely male...unfortunately), I just turn on ACDC and lose myself in the sounds of the guitar.
It would be a mistake to call ACDC melodious....blasphemy even. All I can say is that it resonates with whatever I have inside me. Now elementary physics tells you that resonance leads to increase in the energy levels of the resonating system. The same thing happens to me.
After a tiring day at work, I need half an hour's rock therapy to get me going for a nice post dinner session at home.
Rock rocks!!!!

This and that...

Mum's here.
She came in, took one look at my house and uttered these fateful words, " Kanan, you need a woman".
I was calmly refreshing myself with a big swallow of water. I promptly coughed.
I need not have done that. She only meant a house-maid.
Well, let me state right at the outset that having a "woman" will do me a lot of good. Particularly the live-in kind, but the house-maid she got me has already done me a lot of good in other respects. The house looks spick and span and well organized.
She even got a complete bar-service. My friends (Hetul and Tarun) were thunderstruck when they opened the package. So was I, but to a lesser extent.
God! Its nice to have such cool parents.

Lonely lonely nights...

Please don't jump to the conclusion that I used to have not-so-lonesome nights earlier....Sorry! Life is too unromantic for me.
But yes, I have shifted into my apartment and its lonely.
Its nice otherwise. Nice locality, place all to myself. I have a bedroom and a study. The study has a broadband connection and LOTS of books. But things are all in a mess right now (And I hate messes.....both at work and at home). There is no maid to clean up and do the laundry so I have to do it myself. (which I don't do....)
What I miss the most is the laugh riot that we used to have in our apartment when everyone returned from work...Saraogi, Soni, Hetul, Gunjan, Surya, Tapan...
Now they have all gone their separate ways.... (Hetul is very much around and lives right above my apartment but we hardly get to talk after his status change)
Hmm hmm...I guess I'll blog a lot more now.

Before Mao....

My weekly posts are getting quite depressing these days...
There is a pattern to them. They all happen on Sunday night. That I guess, explains everything.

Just finished reading "Before Mao" by this guy called Patrick Lescot.

It details the history of this guy called Li Lisan. He was one of the architects of the Chinese revolution and this book details his travails in China, Russia and France.
He marries this ravishing Russian girl, has kids by her, is pilloried by the Russians and is kept in "exile" in Russia while Mao goes on with his revolution. He is thrown in the Lubyanka and the Lefortovo. Only when Mao wins, is he freed and allowed to go to China. That too, only when the Chinese government asks for his release. He comes to Beijing and is made the Minister of Labour.
After a few years, when things finally start going ok, Mao thinks up his Great Leap Forward. There is a famine because Mao tries to do in two years what other countries took a century to do. Li falls out with him and is stripped of his powers.

Then the Cultural revolution happened.

Mao needs another revolution to liven up his nights. The results is thousands , nay millions of people killed, a lot of China's cultural heritage destroyed.

And seventy year old Li was pilloried publicly, his house was ransacked and his family was imprisoned in solitary confinement. I went through the gory details for two pages, before I skipped it all and went straight to the epilogue.
Li died of a broken heart caused by his public humiliation and because of his world crashing down around him. His Russian wife Lisa was kept in solitary confinement for eight years. His daughters went through it for two years and then were sent to plant rice.

Finally when Deng Xiaoping came to power, he released them all and overturned all the verdicts. Li Lisan was no longer a revisionist, semi-Trotskyist, reactionary, bourgeoisie spy. But he definitely was dead........


This book depressed me so much that I badly needed a shock therapy. This was duly administered by taking a four kilometer long walk with Green Day blaring in my ears.
As I have related in my previous posts, heavy rock music never fails to buck me up.

Billi Joe...you are God's gift.....to me!!!!

Punnu....

Punnu came home today.
We both lived together in Patel hall. Technically he is my senior but really he is as great a friend as a batchmate (or maybe better??? Who the heck cares anyway...).
We both have seen the best and the worst of life....or probably he has seen worse. But we saw it together. We shared the joys of getting the sports G.C. We grieved together when our hall came under a cloud with the authorities. (Though it was more personal for him than for me). One fine evening, we (me, Punnu and Madhup) climbed the "Patel ka L*&%d" together and held the railing to stop ourselves from getting blown away by the wind.
He graduated six months before I did. There after we sort of lost touch. Next I heard that he had got a nice job. We met in Bangy a year ago and had a rather impersonal "dinner with friends".
Last weekend Saraogi came and we called him. Then I heard that he is freelancing and is in and out of Bangalore though he stays in Mumbai.

This weekend he came home.

Its really nice to have a chat with a dear friend.
To laugh over past trifles (How after a tiring day in the illu, he spent the better part of the night bursting crackers outside my door in the hope that I would wake up and kick his ass.....I was too zonked out by consecutive night-outs to care...).
To grieve over the GPLs we got.
To swap stories about mutual friends (Who married whom).
To seethe over the injustice done to each....

He could'nt, of course, help swiping one of my photo albums (In which he is cavorting around half-naked. And there is a Sardar somewhere admiring his paunch). He promises that he will return it but I have scant hopes....


Its nice to know friends like that.

Hetul's got engaged

Hetul is one of my roomies. He is cheerful, chubby and has a ready laugh. Crack a useless joke and he will laugh. Crack something and he'll laugh. When you are down, he is the best person to buck you up. He and I are room-mates and are going to be neighbours for a decently long period of time.
This weekend, he disappeared on a whirlwind visit to Kanpur and he returned with a ring on his finger. After the customary bumps and heart-to-heart sessions (What did she say? What's her younger sister like?...) reality hit me.
This is an attack on home ground. The "belan-brigade" has signalled the beginning of the onslaught. We are all hugely in the marriage market and one by one each of us is going to be picked off. All of us are dreading the visit home now. Who knows who's turn is next!!!
I am BLISSFULLY happy in my single life. Don't want to change anything. But if all my friends ... people who have given me advice and encouragement when girl after girl ditched me.... If they are going to start disappearing, I don't know what I am going to do.
Should I get a dog? Cultivate a newhobby? Find a support group?
I don't want this life to end. Friday nights at Purple Haze, Saturday nights at 12th Main CCD, Sundays with a nice book and weeknights with my walkman and the walk on outer ring road.....
Why can't we all stay this way all the time????
(The writer got too overwhelmed after this continue writing. He promptly went in search of dinner)