I have grown up in life!!!!

Helloz!!!!
The subject line is because my Dad offered to share his drink of "100 Pipers" with me!!!! I had waited an age for that momentous event to happen....

Anyway, I am busy in wrapping up things here in Bangalore before I go home to unfrazzle my frazzled nerves for a fortnight. Then I take a flight and land up in Singapore.
Dad came here on a whirlwind trip to take a look at how his youngest progeny was getting along. He took a peek at my apartment, was suitably appreciative, had assorted edibles for lunch and dinner, drank cups of tea which I made and offered to share his drink with me.

It was nice on my last day at work. Lots of people came and shook my hand and wished me luck.

I did not know I had so many friends there. I will miss you guys!

No subject

I'm not a perfect person. there are many things i wish i didnt do
But i continue learning. i never meant to do those things to you.
And so i have to say before i go, that i just want you to know

I've found a reason for me, to change who i used to be
A reason to start over new, and the reason is you

I'm sorry that i hurt you, its something i must live with everyday
And all the pain i put you through, i wish that i could take it all away
And be the one who catches all your tears, thats why i need you to hear

I'm not a perfect person, i never meant to do those things to you
And so i have to say before i go that i just want you to know

I've found a reason for me, to change who i used to be
A reason to start over new, and the reason is you
I've found a reason to show a side of me you didnt know
A reason for all that i do, and the reason is you



Don't worry I just flicked the lyrics from Hoobastank. . . . . . . They are nice!

Patience

A few days ago, there was a nice article in The Hindu about writing a novel.
This gentleman called Amitav Kumar has just published a book and wrote an article about what the writing was like.
It was long but interesting. The major idea I took away from it was that it requires a great amount of patience. A full evening can be spent in writing out a character sketch and you still might not be done. From where I come (where every task has to be accounted for in hours) this sounded like the height of inefficiency. But then I realized that I was missing the point.
Writing a book is not about efficiency. Its about creating a work of art. That requires time.
Since then I have started thinking that I find the idea of going through that labourious process rather interesting. Character sketches, plots, similes, metaphors, first drafts, second drafts, third drafts...... If not anything else, this process might just end up teaching me patience.
Talking about patience, I just happened to watch a chinese tea-ceremony on television. Do watch it and you would feel the tea-bag, hot water, sugar and milk powder affair is a blasphemous act.....

I should go home...

On books and music

This other day I got this strange idea.
Music (cassettes or CDs) is like a mistress. You love her, you cannot live without her. She consumes you but six months later you get bored and you move on.
In this case to another album or another band. You keep the music for memory's sake but once the magic has worn off, well its worn off.
Books on the other hand are like friends. You get to know them. You are wary at first about what you are getting into. But as you get to know them better, your friendship grows. You go through them (the books I mean) but you never finish them. You always keep comnig back to them for solace, advice or just for a few laughs.

Talking about friends, a bunch of them have been a great help lately. Very self-lessly one chap has gone out of his way to help me in something important. Even though we knew each other only vaguely when we were in the same milieu. God bless my friends!

I miss Delhi and home.....

A new bookshop in Bangalore

No no! Its been around for ages. Its just that I ran into it (or rather insides it) a few weeks ago and now I am a fan!
Its called The Bookworm. It specializes in second-hand books and sells them at dirt cheap prices.
The books don't look second-hand. The book seller only insists they are. I don't have a problem with that. I get them at a third of the price I would normally pay for them.
Especially now since these days I seem to be perennially out of cash.

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)

On coolness...

Have you ever wondered why some people simply exude coolness???
I have. I even have propounded lots of theories about it, but more of that later..... or probably never.
Coolness....how would you define it?
Is it sophistication? Is it confidence? Or is it simply.... dress sense? I guess its more of the first two and not much of the latter.
Consider a Miss India contestant who has no confidence (self-assurance is a better word). She might be a stunner but if she stutters while talking to you, is she cool??? No way!!!
Another person..this time a guy who has loads of self assurance but has pathetic table-manners...is he cool? Again, not really.
That's what I'd think coolness is but try as I may, I have never been able to attain that ideal which quite a few of my friends seem to attain and even surpass with facile ease. (I dropped in that GRE word only to sound cool myself!!!!)
I guess it depends a lot on the milieu in which the person has been brought up. Of course.... a lot does not mean entirely. The friends I am talking about have all been the scions of upper-middle class families and have gone to posh schools where you learn the facts of life in the fifth standard.
But I remember this friend of mine who studied with me till seventh and then went to off to another one of those schools, but remember distinctly, that even then, whenever I wanted an ideal in terms of conduct in company, it was him.

I don't know why I'm putting this down right now....
Probably because my simulations are still taking a lot of time and its late and I have nothing to do except trawl around on orkut and dredge up old friends and old memories.....
Orkut really is a wonderful tool. I don't have to recall people and wonder what they are doing right now. All I have to do is login, search for him/her and get the drift.
Again, it does not always work with my classmates in school as quite a few of them are not logged in. This orkut thingy is primarily a college phenomenon where everyone has free net connection.
My school buddies don't sign-in with that enthusiasm as who would have time to do stuff like making another profile in an internet cafe where you try to make the most of the half an hour available to you....

But coming back to orkut being a wonderful thing.....
I once read in my Hindi reader that only the person who has almost died of thirst in a parched desert knows the true taste and sweetness of water as it brings him back to life....

Are we not getting drowned by this flood of information about any and everyone in this "global village" ???

Oh!! For a nice skip-free mp3 player!!

I love taking walks. All alone.
But nice music in my ears while I'm donig that really charges me up...makes me feel full of beans. I normally listen to stuff which has a lot of fast music like Aerosmith, The Rasmus and Green day.
I take these walks on a rather lonely stretch of the Outer Ring Road and have met all sorts of people including pimps, whores, truck drivers and of course policemen. No, I have not been mugged yet and I really hope that does not happen to me ever.
Coming back to the topic, I go on walks normally with my walkman or with my discman. Now over the last few days my disc-man has started skipping like a little girl who has just recieved a years' supply of vanilla ice-cream.
A little net-surfing told me that that is a normal complaint with disc-men (Is that right?? Disc-men???) I have a Sony DNF-610, which apparently is a very nicely designed system..with lots of engineering margin. So why this?? Looks like they have a mode which you turn on when you intend to do some slightly intense stuff with your disc-man which apparently increases the laser power. This hits you on the LED's life thing but will give you a skip-free playback for the duration of the rigorous stuff you intend to do with it. But over time, the LED's power would go down and your disc-man starts skipping.
I'm not very sure how correct all this was but anyway....

This has really led me into thinking that one should never buy stuff with moving parts if one can help it. (After all, you are moving, and so is the CD drive....your movement intereferes with the drive's movement and so you get skips).

That's why I'm not so crazy about the ipod with the HDD memory, since that fellow is also going to skip like hell. Atleast it has a good chance of doing that. I'll probably go for an ipod with the flash memory but those things are so costly!!!! (Not that the HDD ipod is not costly. It is. )
I'd really like to get my hands on one ipod shuffle or (better still!) an ipod nano, but I'm waiting for their prices to come down. Till then, my AIWA walkman will have to keep me company....
Its a pity since all the stuff that I really like listening to is in CDs and my discman skips so badly that I sometimes have had to take my walks on tip-toe....

Not using comments on blogs now!!!

If you cannot understand what I mean by the subject line, just look at the comments I got on my previous blog..... Innovative idea definitely but I really do not want to know anything about Texas Turkey Hunting...
Do you???


I'm not sure anyone would be interested so I deleted them.....

New Delhi Bomb blasts

Yesterday three bombs exlpoded in the crowded marketplaces of New Delhi while innocent mothers and children were doing their shopping for Diwali and Eid.

The newspapers are putting the toll at 67 people killed and some 200 injured. When I read the story on rediff, I was shocked. I was in office then. After finishing my owrk, I went home, turned on NDTV only to listen to our honourable Home Minister saying things on these lines:

"We condemn this act in the most stringent terms, there is little else that we can do.
The government is going to release compensation for the victims to the families of the killed and injured.
I request everyone to go home...."

I went crazy with anger on hearing this. We have become a nation who has made practising restraint a national profession. Why can't we go ahead and take out the militant camps ourselves. Why are we spending so much on defence if we cannot even safegaurd our people from fanatics across the border when:
1. We know who they are
2. We know WHERE they are
3. We know what they intend to do to us.

All we do is, cry in the world fora and listen to every Tom, Dick and Harry who tells us to practise restraint while if they were faced with the same situation, they would'nt care two fig-leaves about world opinion.

Dear Home Minister, thank you!!!
Thank you for telling us what you are capable of. Thank you for clearing our doubts about the existence of your balls. Next time onwards, if I raise a gun to defend myself, please don't hold me guilty!

Hmm Hmm..

Whew!!!
Its going to be a new day in some three minutes and I am still waiting for that simulation to end....
Home sweet home....
These days have been one rollicking ride. Working my ass off on weekdays and partying like crazy on weekends. The good thing is that time seems to be whizzing by. Early monday mornings which used to get me so depressed earlier no longer do so. I just sit back and laugh at Monday Morning and say, "Don't worry, your friend Friday Evening is coming soon!!!" May life go on like this!!!

"What's the Frequency Kenneth?
Is your Benzedhrine!!!"

Nothing to do with what I have written before that, but that's what is blaring in my ears right now as I try to stay awake while this bloody thing ends!

"What's the frequency, Kenneth?" is your Benzedrine, uh-huh
I was brain-dead, locked out, numb, not up to speed
I thought I'd pegged you an idiot's dream
Tunnel vision from the outsider's screen
I never understood the frequency, uh-huh
You wore our expectations like an armored suit, uh-huh

I'd studied your cartoons, radio, music, TV, movies, magazines
Richard said, "Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy"
A smile like the cartoon, tooth for a tooth
You said that irony was the shackles of youth
You wore a shirt of violent green, uh-huh
I never understood the frequency, uh-huh

"What's the frequency, Kenneth?" is your Benzedrine, uh-huh
Butterfly decal, rear-view mirror, dogging the scene
You smile like the cartoon, tooth for a tooth
You said that irony was the shackles of youth
You wore a shirt of violent green, uh-huh
I never understood the frequency, uh-huh
You wore our expectations like an armored suit, uh-huh
I couldn't understand
You said that irony was the shackles of youth, uh-huh
I couldn't understand
You wore a shirt of violent green, uh-huh
I couldn't understand
I never understood, don't fuck with me, uh-huh"


Never could get what this song means but it sounds nice so it stays in my playlist!

Diwali is here again. I had planned to ride down to Mangalore on my bike and would have done so had the Rain-God not intervened. Now since it's been pouring all over South India, we decided not to risk our lives. But after that Bandipore trip, I have tasted blood and I need another one like that as soon as the weather clears.
I have taken quite a few trips after that one though which I have not uploaded yet. Need to. Need to.
There has been a Nagarhole trip, a trip to SawanDurga (not sure if that's how you spell it), a trip to Kabini (Oh!!! that heavenly place) and finally one to Pondicherry. All of them were fun but the Pondy trip was the craziest and the most fun......
Comnig back to Diwali. Its a pathetic festival when you are away from your family. I'll probably get roaring drunk on Diwali evening. It'd have been nice to go home....