Title TBD

Pay day: Part 3/3

2011-04-09T15:41:00.000+05:30

Continued from:
Part 1
Part 2

The note! The note I left in the safe! It said that I had taken the money and will be returning it tomorrow!
Sprawled out in a hotel bedroom, my stomach lurched. A series of possibilities crashed through my mind till I went dizzy. My wife had become catatonic last night as I left without letting her glimpse me.
Spending a night at a hotel, I realised that my course of action was now fixed. I had to go back to office. Give Shinde the bag. Go home. Hug my wife and son. Explain what happened.
It was simple. My mind had swayed in the night, but the thought of the note got me back on track. I felt stupid for a moment for leaving the note. No. Its a good thing I did leave it. All I had to do was go back to office with the bag. Adrenaline was pumping through me the past twelve hours. My shuffling feet found the bag on the bed, and I cursed myself. Time to end this.
   I reached an hour late. The sight of cops made me freeze. But they ignored me. They ignored the beads of sweat I had on my forehead. They ignored the bag in my hands. Clearly, this was about something else. I saw all the employees huddled in the conference room. The women were all sitting at one corner, talking constantly, while the men spoke sporadically, with an anxious expression writ on their faces. Shinde's worried countenance loomed before me. "We've been robbed! They took all the money!", he seemed to be saying, but the rest was drowned in pain as his fingers dug into my hand.
"Dipika opened the office today and found the safe wide open! She called me right away and I came as soon as I could. This is a disaster!"
   I looked from his face, to the safe, to Dipika, who was unnaturally chatty today, no wonder due to being the centre of attention for something exciting, doodling on a scrap of paper in front of her. What about the note? Did I imagine leaving it there? I wasn't sure anymore. I wanted to laugh. This is unbelievable. Ask me whats in the bag, Shinde. Go on, ask me. Just look at it. Be curious for a change. JUST ASK, DAMMIT! Shinde, however, still seemed to be going on about something... Thats when it happened, I felt a tug on the bag and whipped about. A hawaldar was passing by, and his lathi was caught in the bag strap. As he was trying to free it, I kept thinking when he would finally ask me to give him the bag. Even if he knelt to feel the bag, I was sure he would be suspicious. I wanted him to take the bag from me, so I yanked at the strap, but only managed to free the lathi instantly. The bemused hawaldar just walked away. I was still standing in front of Shinde, while the others sat at the conference table. Shinde seemed to be getting worse, babbling about something I couldn't hear anymore over the background din of the cops barking orders at their subordinates. I had had enough.
   I raised the bag to waist-height now, letting my gaze go from his eyes to the bag. He looked at the bag, with a glazed look in his eyes. His breath was an intermittent wheeze now. I pitied him. Suddenly, his grip on my hand loosened. He finally understood, even if it didn't show as his hand dropped unnaturally. As my free hand moved towards the bag's zipper, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Shinde keel over and clutch his chest. A cop got to him before he hit the floor.
   The employees were huddled over the scene now with the cops. The cop who held him was still barking orders to get an ambulance, trying to revive him. I felt nothing. They shuffled us all back to the conference room. As an unconscious Shinde was being moved onto a stretcher, we were told to leave immediately for the day. As I got up, Dipika caught my eye, tapped on the scrap of paper in front of her, got up and left. I walked over to where she was sitting and realised she wasn't doodling at all. All she'd written on it was 'fifty-fifty'.

Pay day: Part 2/3

2011-03-18T11:52:00.002+05:30

Continued from Part 1

My nerves were getting the better of me. Maybe it was just the amount of money I was carrying around, but my thoughts were a bad cocktail of fear and irrational urges. I would catch people nearby giving the bag a quick glance. They knew. If four of them came from different directions, I probably didn't have much of a chance to protect the bag. I felt the sudden cold, wet sensation down the length of my legs. Thinking about it made me feel it again on my palms.

Reason kicked in. They couldn't know what I had in the bag. Its just natural to glance at a bag someone is carrying. I reached the railway platform and a local train was just pulling in. Rush-hour was still on. Amidst the shouts of people trying to get on, a realistic scenario of losing the bag in the boarding scuffle entered my head, and I decided to wait till the crowd thinned a bit.

I walked over calmly to the back of the platform, leaned against the wall and kept the bag between my legs. On the bench in front of me, a young man and a woman were sitting intimately, he had his hand across her shoulders, she was leaning on his shoulder, her hand on his thigh. I caught the distinct string of black beads of a mangalsutra across the nape of her neck. The man's hand seem empty of any adornments telling me he was probably unmarried. An affair. I got angry at myself for jumping to a conclusion so quickly. But something about the way they sat just told me I was right. I shifted the bag between my feet and thought of Dipika.

I had enough money to start a new life and sustain it comfortably. In all her cold looks, she was still incredibly beautiful. She would want a man who could provide for her easily, even if she wanted to be independent. Perhaps the prospect of a new life with me might also appeal to her. I chuckled at my fantasies. My thoughts quickly returned to my wife and child. Things were perfect. Why was I entertaining such ideas in the first place? The money. I imagined handing over the money to Shinde the next morning. That was powerful and calming enough to stop my mundane fantasies.

   The crowd still seemed to be pouring in. I decided to not risk it anymore and just take a taxi back home. As I picked up the bag, out of the corner of my eye, I saw another man who was just leaning on the wall start walking in my direction. I clenched the bag tightly and turned to walk away from him and towards the station's exit. Passing through the crowd, as I reached the exit, I veered sharply to the closest wall and almost hugged it. The man walked out with the crowd and just kept walking on... Good. I got into the first taxi I saw in front of me and headed home.
   For some inexplicable reason, I asked the driver to stop at a street close to my house, instead of directly going home. I got out and decided to walk back, unseen, in the dark connecting alleys. No sooner had I stepped on my street than I saw it. A huge crowd. At my house. I could hear a woman wailing in the centre of the crowd. I crept closer, the woman's voice seemed familiar now. My son was running around, a small airplane in his hand, oblivious to whatever had happened. He spotted me in the distance, ran and hugged my leg. As I patted his head, he looked up and went, "Why do they say that you are dead? Mummy keeps crying and all the others tell me its because you are dead." I was confused. I just told him, "Go play. I have to talk to mummy now." Clearly, there was some misunderstanding. All I had to do was go there and stand in front of her. Why did she think I was dead? As I walked on, passing a house on the street, I heard the news blaring out through the open door. The train I had missed, had derailed near Kurla and jumped over to the neighbouring track. In a matter of mere seconds, an oncoming train from the neighbouring track had collided with it. Mutilated beyond recognition, dozens of bodies were strewn over the tracks. I had taken thrice the time to get home, and she had assumed the worst.
   I found the events silly now. All I had to was walk over to the crowd of neighbours. Their looks would pass fleetingly between shock, relief and even fear. But, my legs were frozen. I couldn't take a single step forward. I had the bag in my hand. The crowd was in front of me. All anyone had to do was turn around to spot me. I looked at my son playing across the street. All my thoughts screamed at him to call out to me over the wailing of my wife and the murmurs of the crowd. That would end this farce. For all my mental shouts, he didn't listen... I looked at the crowd again, hoping one... just one, any one of them, would turn away from looking at the woman in the centre and look at her husband standing just behind them. They could end this drama.
   An eternity passed till I felt I could move again. My wife's sobbing gasps were getting shorter. Her words, incoherent. Through the slivers of light between people's legs, I could see her twitching heels rub erratically against the gravel. What if the shock of seeing me was too much for her to take?
I shouldn't face her now. I couldn't face her right now...

Part 3

Pay day: Part 1/3

2011-02-25T11:49:00.004+05:30

Note: This is a retelling of a story I heard originally in Marathi, nearly a decade ago. It was told during a picnic by one of my coaching class teachers, Mr. Milind Wakankar. I don't know the original source, if anyone does, then please let me know so I can give a reference to the actual author. The tale occurs in Bombay, or Mumbai, as its called now, and seems to be sometime in the late 80s.

Monday

My boss' approaching foot steps did not break my mid-day reverie. It was going to be a lovely week. My wife and son were waiting at home so we could go out and shop for Diwali which was around the corner. I was going to receive a bonus for the festival, like everyone else of course. But I had just been promoted too, so I was going to receive a bigger bonus in addition to my increased wages.
Mr. Shinde's shadow over my desk made me look up. He seemed slightly anxious. I was about to inquire, when he said, "The board has decided to give the bonuses and salaries in cash. The bank will take a while to process the payments through the usual cheques, which might not be in time for the festival." This seemed very considerate of them, so I said, "Thats great! But clearly, you've got something on your mind."
"The money will arrive in tonight and be kept in the safe, considering the sheer amount of money, I don't want to risk the others finding out about it. Also, I have to leave office now, so I can be in time for my meeting tomorrow in Nagpur. I can trust only you with this information, you and Dipika, since she is the treasurer and already knows about the money."
"So, what do you want me to do?", I asked, already striking off 'shopping' from the list in my head.
"Stay here till the money arrives. Dipika is out of town herself today and will come only tomorrow. Just put the money in the office ssafe securely, and then you can go home."

Shinde trusted me, always had. It was a nice feeling to know that. Ms. Dipika Ahuja, however, always gave me a look that conveyed no emotion whatsoever. A young employee, the youngest to be appointed in the whole firm, in fact, she seemed to radiate a certain confidence which belied her humble beginnings in the suburbs. But her curt tone and blunt remarks gave clear signs of being one of the most cut-throat individuals I had ever dealt with. She'd single-handedly managed portfolios which even seasoned professionals from her field pondered before considering. She was being considered strongly to be sent to the head office. I smiled. It seemed like a typical Bombay dream. Clawing your way from the sewers to the city spire, hoping to be cleansed and fit in when you arrive. Counting her, Shinde and myself, only three people in the office knew about the cash arriving.

They arrived an hour after everyone had left for the day. I was telling my wife that I would be late. She pressed for a reason; a brief, "Urgent work", was enough to end the conversation. Four of them. Barely a word was spoken by three of them. The fourth guy asked my name, confirmed my identity via a verbal password we'd agreed upon and he confirmed his password as well. It was a trick I thought of in the nick of time to make the transaction safer. He handed me a dark bag which was surprisingly lighter than my imagination's, turned and left with the rest.

I put the bag in the safe, locked it and was about to leave, when an odd fear gripped me. What if someone breaks into the office? What if they saw the men who had just arrived and concluded the obvious? It seemed too risky. I took the bag out of the safe. I ran my finger along its spine and had an urge. What if they had miscounted? The bag had stacks of the money divided into neatly wrapped plastic covered blocks. I ripped open the first one...
After an hour, I was satisfied. I hastily scribbled a note and put it inside the safe before locking. All doors and windows were locked. I checked. Then I checked again. I made a short call to tell my wife that I was on my way. I picked up the bag, and left the office...

Part 2
Part 3

The 9th victim

2010-11-02T23:14:00.010+05:30

"It was a bad time to wake up, even when all I had to do was vomit. I didn't remember her name as she lay curled up next to me. I couldn't even see her face. Maybe I should have, I would have seen the pale cold skin. That would have snapped me to my senses. But such things never come to you when you just want to heave out your liquored up insides.

It wasn't my house, and there was a constant muffled ringing which I couldn't place. I didn't even care, as I swayed to the wash room and collapsed on my knees to do what was necessary. The first jolt brought me to my senses briefly, the ringing seemed familiar now, and sharper.

I heave again.

I feel clearer, but sleep is fast catching up to fill each void made by clarity. I still cannot place the ringing, and the voices... loud voices.

There is a crash; darkly attired wisps fill the room. More shouting. This time I can barely make out the words.

I hear a name, maybe it's hers. I am still on my knees, which are starting to ache. I look down and see that I am kneeling on what seems to be a razor on the tiled floor. I pick it up; it has a weird dark red edge... I fly backwards, feeling a sharp tug near my neck. A sharp pain and I fade to black."

Det. JC: "I got a call at 3:11 in the morning, which meant it could only be the perp. He has always called us up at precisely that time. I had mere minutes.

"This one is at ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||", he said and hung up. I knew what he meant, but I never expected it to be at the place he said. As the initial shock wore over, I called up the nearby precincts and rushed over to the address. We knew the MO. Slit wrists. Left lying in bed as if asleep. Each and every one of them.

We never knew how he would get them alone. They all had traces of the same sedative in their blood. This was the seventh victim. With each kill, he was getting bolder. The first one was a hooker he might have picked up. The next a dancer at a downtown exotic club. The owner of a pet store was found dead in a similar manner. Then, he moved on to a graduate student. Top student of her batch, too. He killed a housewife next, when her husband was out. The sixth one was found dead in her bed, with her unconscious husband in the same bed. Blood tests revealed the same sedative in his body too. He was one of our suspects for a while. All the victims had engaged in consensual intercourse before their deaths. As they would drift off to sleep, he would slit their wrists. As if to mock the investigators, he would leave the razor in the bathroom. No traces, no DNA, only the victim's blood on the blade.

I also knew it was too late. He calls from the address, but there is no clue to be found by the time he leaves.

But given the woman this time, I had to reach there with the greatest show of force my authority could allow."

"I put on my 'I'm a victim too here' face. Its impossible for me to not seem guilty. I was caught in bed with a corpse, a famous one at that. The people wouldn't accept that someone like |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| was involved in a one night stand or an affair. It was too much of a jolt for the common mind to bear. The razor just had my fingerprints, I still don't know how its possible. The cops keep grilling me, but it seems they are not convinced. I know they want a scapegoat... but she seems to have fallen victim to the same predator who had killed six other women.

I was beaten on the first night, grilled, kept in a closed cell without water or food. They came and took my blood on the first night. They didn't need to stick a needle in me, scooping some off the floor would also have sufficed.

Strangely, they didn't bother me much after that night. I understood why during my trial."

Det. JC: "We were surprised to find our suspect at the scene. But when he held the razor in his hand, we knew we'd gotten him. Maybe he had finally snapped. Maybe this was what he was leading to with the six before her. He went unconscious in the scuffle that followed. He was resisting arrest and being uncooperative, so we had to use a little force. We found his fingerprints on the razor, so we assume he might have been in the process of wiping it clean like the ones before.

However, the lab reported that his blood showed large amounts of Rohypnol, a strong date-rape drug. This sheds new light on the case. The suspect seems to have been drugged and forced into the intercourse, possibly with the actual perp involved before or after. But with such an evidence, it was like the husband of the 6th victim all over again, or possibly something more sinister."

"I finally see some hope, my attorney assures me that I should be able to get an acquittal since they look at me as an unwitting victim rather than an adulterer. He's convinced the bench that I might have simply been at the wrong place at the wrong time, a misfortune, but not a felony. I have a hint of a smile after days, I am going to be acquitted. But I should have been more careful. I am still wondering when she slipped the drug in my drink. Its a good thing I don't drink before the kill."

No Compunction

2010-10-25T23:20:00.001+05:30

TNNNG’s Status on Google read off from the lyrics of some song, which went as follows:

“Jeena meraaaa... mushkil hai yaar tere bina, tere bina, tere bina, tere bina, tere bina, tere bina, tere bina, tere bina; Marna mera, mushkil hai yaar tere bina, tere bina, tere bina, tere bina, tere bina, tere bina, tere bina, tere bina, te-re binaaa, tere bina, tere bina, tere bina, tere bina, tere binaaa…”

Needless to say, such a thing of joy deserves a blog-shat (sic)

TGWTT: The guy needs to learn that alliteration is not good in excess and it is more than alliteration, it is repetition

TNNNG: alliteration leads to altercation

TGWTT: though it started with defecation

TNNNG: it ends with defamation

TNNNG: I just prefer to express my expostulation in fact, it's almost an obligation

TGWTT: I get it, and your services need some appreciation

TNNNG: I just hope this would forestall the trend's proliferation

TGWTT: oh, no... not unless we resort to prohibition

TNNNG: but all you guys are busy with procrastination

TGWTT: us? We’re not responsible for such mental infarctions!

TNNNG: you could at least stand up against this humiliation

TNNNG: here I bear the onus of this task even while I’m under probation

TGWTT: I know, I know it wasn't your decision and pretty much against your volition

TNNNG: but now my brain cells are on the verge of decrepitation

TGWTT: better that than rhyming in desperation

TNNNG: but what do I do about my exasperation

TGWTT: hmm, ignoring the lyrics seems to be the best action

TNNNG: definitely the best way to fend off frustration

Though I’d like to keep up my act of remonstration

TGWTT: I agree, there seems to be a sense of retribution

TNNNG: waise we haven't lost our touch, this was a good demonstration

TGWTT: oh yes, we've still got the imagination

TNNNG: now if only you'd join hands against the perpetration

TGWTT: even if our vocabulary is unaffected by our vocation

Oh, I wish I could, and I’d gladly share the incrimination

TNNNG: you can do whatever I can, there certainly ain't no discrimination

TGWTT: but in terms of lyrics, compared to you, I know a meagre fraction

TNNNG: I can handle their department; your company will just amplify my jubilation

TGWTT: so, all you ask for is my participation?

TNNNG: yeah, this activity needs revivification and the practice needs condemnation

TGWTT: so, I am handling which section? Yeah, we need to cause some more irritation

TNNNG: we will divide the roles in the next session

TGWTT: sounds like we're headed towards social abolition

TNNNG: it's either that or eternal damnation

TGWTT: I’d be fine with the former; the latter is a scary notion

TNNNG: that certainly is no prevarication. Now let’s end the discussion and resort to more normal modes of conversation

TGWTT: yea, we can always live up to our reputation.

TNNNG: Howdy?

(Based on true events. They occurred on a slow evening. A Monday evening)

The Rana Syndrome and Idiocy

2010-07-24T13:37:00.009+05:30

I admit there are a few people who loathe me, and then there is Rana, who takes loathing to an entirely new level. His lack of trust in me stands solid on the bedrock of delusion, so much so that I think I will call him religious. Yes. I'll say he is religious... when it comes to hating me.

This post is a rant, because since today morning, the loathing has become mutual. Reasons can be elicited from the conversation below and I pity those who cannot understand Hindi, since translating the dialogue will kill the effect.

0700 hrs

(The phone blares next to a snoring body of me)

Me(mumbling): "Hello"

Him: "Suar saale! Kahan hai?"

"So raha tha."

"Abey... tu... tu kaisa kameena hai bey? ek number ka suar hai!"

(Now I'm getting angry) "Abey maine kya kiya?!"

"Saale kutte! Tujhe itne din pehle bola tha ek phone number message karne! Aaj mein Bombay aa gaya hoon aur tab bhi number nahi bheja!"

"Abey number bheja tha! Ussi din! Message delivery report bhi thi! Kam se kam bata toh deta ki nahi mila hai aur ek baar fir message kar deta!"

And now here comes his brilliant defense:

"Abey maine socha, tu ek number ka haraami aur kameena aadmi hai. Tune jaan boojh kar number nahi bheja hoga, isliye maine bhi tujhe dobara nahi poocha. Agar poochta, toh tu fir se haraampa dikha deta aur message nahi karta. Jaanta hoon main"

"Abey saale #$%#% $%^$&^ ke #$%#&*( ke &*@$!@ tukde! YEH BHI KOI WAJAH HOTI HAI!? B%&*(&@% Saale #$^%#^% ki jaat! Tu gadha hai toh ismein meri galti hai!?"

Evidently, the man's faith in me being an asshole is too deeply rooted... I am like the Higher controlling power to his AA member, like the 'voices in my head' to his paranoid schizophrenic, like an evil Chuck Norris to his internet self and dammit the asshole just doesn't let up!

I wish I could say that this is just one incident, but its one among millions. He might even go ahead and state the the BP oil spill is due to me. Such is his faith in my ability to lie and cheat people that he is incapable of admitting that there is even a shred of moral fiber in me... What brought this on is a mystery to me, but its just the way it is.

Even my most innocent queries into the matter are met with a giggle followed quickly by, "Abey sunn na... suar hai tu!"

A pause after a hiatus

2010-06-25T19:51:00.003+05:30

My D60 is lying in front me, looking forlorn, wishing I take it out for a nice set of photographs... but all I manage to do is set the white balance on 'Sunny' and capture a scene from my window. Its a clear sky, which is odd given I am in Bombay and we all know what rains in the city are like! A copy of Suketu Mehta's 'Maximum City' also lies in front of me, the bookmark sticking out, bent at the corners... (Tsk tsk, I need to avoid that). I am right now at the part where he is discussing the gangwars that happened in the city. Beneath that, lies Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus. Unread. Timequake. Read. God Bless you Mr. Rosewater. Read.

I am at an odd juncture in life now. I have finished 5 years of engineering in "the most prestigious destination for engineering in the country"; the quoted phrase is quotidian for me now, having used it countlessly in so many cover letters mailed to professors and universities. I am unsure about what to do next, but I am surrounded by so many things to do. I can picture myself walking down the street, taking photographs of the city and people. People are predictable, the moment they see the camera in your hands, they'll go about whatever they were doing with a smile on their face, or brush their hair in style... some even come up to me to ask if I am going to publish these in a newspaper. I grin.

I look into the distance and see the hills, and a yearning fills me to just pack a bag and leave, but I don't. No, its not some cocked up notion of responsibility to the household, or even laziness. Just that right now, I have burdened myself mentally with things to do first.

Its always about what to do first. Should I explore the country now? Read books from that long list, which now lies tattered somewhere and useless, since I have gone over it so many times? The distraction of games on the Playstation2 at home lasts only so long, I have packed it off after the initial frenzy of playing 12 hours a day. OK, so playing video games was not really on 'things to do first'.

I have been here for really long, growing up in the suburbs, I haven't explored the breadth and length of this monstrous metropolis. Exploring the city should be on 'things to do first'. Despite this lull, I am not brooding over the lack of a destination now. I could learn a few more skills. Yes, something that is on 'things to do first'.

I haven't even blogged about anything for months, and this is just me using another avenue to clarify my thoughts. These are days when all I have is an explosion in my head of tasks, and as some geeks would put it, a scheduling problem on my hands. In all hope, I will finally get to smaller, regular posts on this space and less of a wannabe Vonnegut styled narration.

Grenoble Diaries: A soliloquy in the weekend market

2009-06-07T17:52:00.004+05:30

I know I am supposed to post something else, but I happened to visit the nearby weekend market today morning and it reminded me a lot of home. So, before I forget, here's the post. The regular one will follow soon.
In an open space between parking lots, or in similar settings, weekend mornings in Grenoble are filled with the noise of hurried shoppers and dealers yelling bargains on their wares. You get a lot of decent deals on cheap goods and also some freshly prepared food and fresh vegetables. I wanted to buy a few essentials so I decided to check it out myself. It was similar to markets back in India. Though what the dealers were yelling was mostly gibberish mixed with familiar words. But they had the same expedited process of dealing. People browsed, haggled if possible for the price, paid and left smiling as fast as they could. I usually am slow to shop, not too much, but I shop using a simple 'yes/no/not now/hell no' decision making system in case I am not sure about what I have to buy. So, my thoughts went like this:

Yay! Market! Cheap shit finally! Damn, they yell here their throats away here as well... Well, people will be people, ok... should start browsing

(Passing Stores)
Hmm, do I need bikinis? nope, not for anyone I know... do I need children's clothes, nope... holy crap! naked chicks on cigarette lighters, think of all the puns you could make with the phrase 'light up'!

(further down)
WTF is he doing in a bathrobe in public!? Ah, selling bed-covers AND bathrobes together... Ooo shiny! (spots dealer selling old coins and violins) Well, i can't play it, and I am not Dawn to even judge whether any of these is worth something, but huge frigging coins... nice...

(passing shops selling food)
Food is for those with refrigerators, no point sticking around any of these, damn that chicken smells good though... Do you people really have to roast it in the open and pour all that sauce till the smell will eventually drive me insane?
Woah! Adidas shoes sold on the street! wait... 28 euros?! hell no!

(slow browsing)
All that technology and they can't sell decent forks on the street... ah, made in China, should have known. Belts, no... scarves, why will I need one?... hmm, no idea what you cut with this, doesn't look sharp or of any use... sigh, more women's clothing... Hookay, where to go next?... niccee!(spots cute chick)

Oh how nice! They have special prams for twins here! (passes young couple pushing their twins in a pram) Hmm, cheap 2 pin connectors, relatively ofcourse; nice pliers, look pretty handy; but I shouldn't buy anything for this place... Aha! A pack of small LEDs for 1 Euro! Cool; should I buy them? NOO! (mental self-slap) Not gonna buy the redundant! Lamington Road hasn't shut down yet! Gotta move away! GOTTA MOVE THE FUCK AWAY!

Ah, last shop and even this one is selling cheap skirts with black and white designs... seem nicely skimpy (spotting girl trying it on by holding it on herself) Sell something for men retards and not just to watch!
Nothing really worth-while... what a waste of time...

Meme: Weekend markets are for the early birds who are hungry that early as well.

Grenoble Diaries: The first weekend of hunger 1

2009-05-28T12:08:00.006+05:30

(growr)My stomach growls in hunger, which is odd, since I have just finished 4 sandwiches with smoked bacon and mayonnaise; the last of what might constitute a 'real' meal for the coming days. I look at the list I've just finished.

***Food Items in Room***
2 boxes of La vache qui rit cheese.
2 half finished packs of breakfast cereal.
5 microwaveable meals.
50% of a 70% dark chocolate bar.
125 gms of almonds

Thats all I have left to survive for 4 days. I have a total of 5.89 euros left as I type this and its disturbing to realise that a round trip to the institute will hit me for 5.60 euros. I look outside the window of my room. (growrr) A pretty chick passed by incidentally. I stretch out my arms and yawn, already knowing what I am going to do for the days...
But before all that, I need to explain how this situation came to be...

Wrestling with red tape and the academic sections

On the flight to Paris, CDG from IG, New Delhi.

They said that getting an internship at the end of your 4th year is slightly more difficult than trying to dive into an open sewer and coming out cleaner. Given the easy going attitude of my guide, that seemed to be some KGPian legend. I was not prepared for the authorities response to the matter though.

Me: "Sir, I have secured an internship in France. Is it possible that you could allow me to go?"
Guide: "Of course! I will tell you the letters you need to write to the Dean of Undergraduate studies and the recommendation from the Head of the Department"
Me: (perplexed, yet smiling) "Thank you sir, I'll prepare a draft and get it as soon as possible"

2 Days later, Dean's office
Dean: (dour look) "What do you want?"
Me: (placing letter and explaining situation)
Dean: (clearly angry) "Why do you want to go? You should be proud of your alma mater! Work here, don't go to them. What is this!? If everyone goes then who will work? Anyway, its not mentioned on your application how this internship is going to be linked to your M.Tech thesis. (clearly stricken with sadistic delight) Get that mentioned! I don't know if he is allowing you to go! (short laugh)"

20 minutes later, Guide's office
Me: "Sir, you need to explicitly mention that this internship is linked to my M.Tech thesis"
Guide: "Hmmm, and how is it linked to your thesis?"
Me: (shooting off a random idea)
Guide: "OK"(Writes, 'This internship is highly linked to his M.Tech thesis' on my application.)

After another session of er... 'discussion' with the Dean, I finally have a letter of approval to carry with me.
Though what I have presented here is a short excerpt from the entire arduous procedure. The number of applications I had to submit alone would have blacklisted me on every tree-hugging environmentalist group on the planet. Hewlett-Packard however, might send me a complimentary pen for emptying so many ink cartridges. After a lot of bitching, moaning and listening to crap spouting from all corners of the academic section here at IIT, I was finally given permission to go for the internship.

Now all I had to hope for was the flight not crashing on its way to Lyon.
Next: INRIA, Houille Blanche and cute girls at convenience stores.

INRIA, Main building

Meme: Fear of heat can be a great motivator. For the religious, it works with hell, for me it worked with KGP in summers.

We, Protest

2009-04-11T10:12:00.005+05:30

Somewhere during the first few days of February this year, a bunch of people (including me) suddenly realized that their lives had been too perfect so far and they decided to do something about it. Next day, they assembled in public with placards in their hands and a clear purpose in their minds. The result was this –

PV solemnly draws attention to the cause.

AVN Murthy: (Never) too busy for a good cause.

Sayandeep: Protesting for the right to assume.

Abhas: The 'real' wikipedian protester.

Trying to make heads turn.

Ashish V: Err… never mind.

In a short period of time, we attracted the attention of passers-by just like a crowd of people holding placards silently does. What follows is a series of WTF expressions that we got from people who couldn’t understand the cause (we don’t blame them; we blame the abstruse nature of the cause). We tried to approach them, coax them into supporting the cause, but they wouldn’t talk to us.

“Mom, is that you?”

“Damn!” (We wish they had looked higher.)

“Ooh, matching T-shirts!!!! Wait, what’s that?”

“Yes sweety, I’ll explain the cause tonight.” (nudge nudge, wink wink)

“Am I gonna be on TV?”

“Do you have accommodation?” (That’s what he really asked… honest.)

“At least my causes are well supported today.”

We did find some empathizing souls among the crowd; they stood by us resolutely taking time off from their busy schedules:

…

Tired, distracted, yet protesting.

He really would have.

… (again)

With special thanks to Barack Obama.

All images courtesy of Anikh Thakur; Resident photographer, asshole extraordinaire, feared in all dimensions and existing in 4.

Disclaimer: We did this only for the cause. It’s dear to us and we didn’t want to forget it. Please don’t sue us… for any reason.

Sincerely, The guy who typed this and Vinayak

No Water

2009-04-04T06:24:00.005+05:30

It's around 0600 hrs and as expected, there is no frigging water to use in the morning! This happens in quite a few halls here at IIT KGP when the temperatures start soaring and humidity is like an unseen clingy blanket on your skin, keeping the cool out and the irritation in. People suddenly wake up to the ritual of bathing (no, they don't do it because it keeps them clean)
Hence, 'No Water'.
To be sung to the tune of Led Zeppelin's 'No Quarter'

Close the door, put on the light
You know you won't be foul tonight,
The sun falls hard and don't you know
The streams of showers are flowing slow
Wearing cloth thats fetid all through
They carry refuse that must wash true

They choose the bath when everyone goes,
They left no water,
They left no water.
Oh...

Walking side by side with filth,
The stench marks their every step
The sun drives the sweat on their brow,
The hogs of doom are snorting more
They carry refuse that must wash true
To build a dream for me and you
They choose the bath when everyone goes,
They left no water,
They have no water,
They left no water,
They have no water...they think about no water...with no water water

Meme: People bathe everyday. Jackasses bathe in summers only.

Death by the Callous

2009-03-23T02:12:00.013+05:30

Events dated 22nd Mar '09 and compiled from various internal sources. The facts stated here are merely as told and heard, and not fabricated by me and presented for the purpose of presenting them as a student of this institute.

I wake up at 2022 hrs. I know what has happened today. One of us has died. Rohit Kumar, from LLR hall, Electrical Dept. died due to the on campus hospital's negligence today. As far as I recalled, he was dead due to the hospital's ineptitude and negligence in the matter. Sentenced to death by an incompetent staff and truant doctors, Rohit waited for agonising hours before he was given a discharge for being transferred to another better equipped hospital. I am ashamed to admit that I had become callous to the point of just uttering 'damn!' upon hearing this. But when I woke up in the evening, something had changed...
As I walked to the mess, I heard agitated murmurs in the corridors, and the facts of the day slowly started filling in... the Director had resigned, 15 hundred students had landed up at his bungalow and trashed the place... his car had been trashed as well... and finally, an open house session was scheduled at 2200.
Links were flashed over status messages and IMs. The campus newspaper, Scholar's Avenue ran a report stating some of the facts for the people to read. Their story can be found here. I saw the beast of agitation rear its head with people not backing down this time. At 2130, a friend calls me up and asks me to join him for the open house session, which soon gets shifted to the Tagore Open Air theatre instead of the cramped auditorium. I see thousands of angry eyes, most of whom did not know Rohit, but are their to show their solidarity and the drama begins to unfold on stage...
After news of his death had spread about the campus, an angry mob landed up at the director's house on campus. Given the situation, its natural to expect people to find someone to crucify for the terrible event that happened. The director being the most powerful authority on campus also made him responsible in a way, but when asked about it, apparently he was indifferent to the point of absolving himself of any accountability whatsoever. The nature of his response sparked the student ire which was already like a powder keg about to blow up anytime. In a mob frenzy, they vandalised his bungalow, painting the entire premises with spite. They even took out his car from the garage and trashed it. Shrey posted a more accurate version of these events on his post.

I am not sure what this achieved, but an angry mob seldom thinks. After the director, when the Deputy director was confronted, he is alleged to have remarked," Whats the big deal?" This led to his resignation as well and that brings us to the open house session.

The points that were proposed to revamp the health care machinery seemed so obvious that its shocking to realise we got by for 60 years without such measures in place. A few 5th yr students raise some crucial points before the present authorities so that they are also looked into as a priority. But a lot of time is wasted as shouts from the crowd drown out what the authorities reply with. In the end, one of Rohit's unfortunate friends narrates his harrowing experience since morning. What I state here is a loose rendition based on the narrative:

Rohit had an epileptic fit on his way to the hospital.. he was sick anyway... and in that fit he fell down hard from the cycle rickshaw he was travelling in.
He injured his head and was taken to the campus hospital in that state.

the hospital has no ER and they have just one doctor on duty on a Sunday... it seems he came after 3 hours after being called and did not treat Rohit right away. He realised that he and the hospital were not equipped to deal with the matter... After 2 and a half hours, they finally gave in to the pleas of his friends to take him to a better equipped hospital.The hospital's ambulance is hardly one... they somehow fit Rohit in diagonally, his friends sat in the back, cramped as they were, and besides the driver, the hospital sent one guy from pharmacy. No medical staff.

His face had an oxygen mask and the hospital staff had forgotten to turn on the tank supply, which was later done in the ambulance by one of his friends.

He was lying unsupported in that space while they were on the road... lolling his head as the vehicle moved and somewhere in between, his mask started filling with blood...

One of his friends called up the hospital doctor and started following his instructions on the speaker phone... ofcourse, the guy from the hospital sat as as helpless as a spectator...

Imagine an untrained student, pumping out blood for half an hour, trying to save his friend's life while the hospital guy just sitting practically useless.
They decided not to take him so far off to Kolkata and instead just take him to one of the better equipped hospitals nearby in the district.
After they reached, one of the guy's friends satyed at his side while the other ran in trying to find the ER and other facilities... the patient was breathing when they wheeled him inside...
But it was too late by then...

The session ended in cries for resignations. The chairman of the hospital and the Dean of Student Affairs resigned from their posts, creating a void in the upper echelons. An external investigation will look into the matter as promised. It is still appalling that despite common knowledge about the situation, it took the death of an innocent young boy for students to rise against something like this. It would be a shame if this was yet another incident that we got used to and went back to our lives as they were, with our unchanged attitudes and our silent regrets.

If this doesn't do it, then I don't know when all of us will wake up.

Other posts:
Aniruddh Sanjeev, Ramkumar, Scholar's Avenue , Scholar's Avenue Blogspot
Shrey Goyal , Bishnoi

Meme: Death is always too high a price to pay for change.

On Thakur's Latest Look

2009-03-11T15:01:00.002+05:30

The look Thakur is currently sporting has somehow been seen by the benevolent people at Explosm. On most guys however, 'pimp' is the choice for comparison.

Meme: If you think you can have more hair on your face than your head and not look like a pimp, then you better be leaking perverted sadism to throw people off-balance.

In Memoriam : Michael Crichton ('42 - '08)

2008-11-21T10:32:00.013+05:30

I did not know Michael Crichton (pronounced Cry-Ten, rhymes with frighten) as a person, though his words as an author have left their mark on me. I recall borrowing 'Jurassic Park' from a friend years ago and being captivated by it for hours. Crichton went into a fair amount of detail and had a knack of making the science seem plausible enough for you to consider the scenarios to occur in reality. Yes, i really hated InGen for all its evil plans. I hope that after the debacle of the movies, 'Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World' and 'Jurassic Park 3' there is no 4th one which makes the guy spin in his grave. To continue, later I got hooked to 'Sphere', 'Congo', 'The Andromeda Strain' and his other novels, some of which were published under pseudonyms of 'John Lange' and 'Jeffry Hudson'. This was a pretty awesome guy going by his novels and even if it is unfortunate that most people I know personally haven't read his works, there are few who haven't watched adaptations of his masterpieces over the years. His demise at 66 still seems untimely, but his genius has long been immortalized. In case you haven't Googled it yet.

His plots often explored the moral constructs of organisations and governments rather than just a few characters. Ian Malcolm as the pessimistic yet realistic and almost always damningly right mathematician was able to steer you through the chaotic events in 'Jurassic Park' or the ostensibly amiable Jerry in 'Sphere' who would manifest your thoughts in the physical realm both gave contrasting opinions of themselves through the books and changing your opinion along the way. Despite being a master of 'Hard Science Fiction', he also forayed into vexing plots with detective drama or where the stage of suspense was in political halls. 'Rising Sun' was about the cultural and corporate disparity of Japanese conglomerates in the US and was highlighted in a detective drama unraveling around a murdered prostitute in the board room. As you might have realised by now, this was not always about science fiction as much as the 'thriller element' that he was able to create using a few simple concepts and letting them proliferate slowly along the pages. There are some who believe that his works often centre on a megalomaniacal body and that his portrayal of scientists and governments is akin to selfish villains of society(I really don't mind this view though) However, most of them imply that the scientific process is not as simple as it seems, and random failures are an integral part of us not being able to adapt to the forces of chaos. A well educated 'author surrogate' in his novels gives Crichton's own stabilising perspective about the blitzkrieg of events happening in the story. His narrative style keeps the reader on edge all the while, as he unravels the intricacies of the human psyche in each of his characters, when he throws a scenario in the reader's face with all its repercussions and the impending 'clock of doom' construct he is known to use. Although some ideas might seem a bunch of bull to you, you can flip back to the end of any Crichton novel and be amazed at the numerous references he lists for the reader to follow up with the book.
Apparently, Michael started writing way back in high school and just kept going (quite unlike yours truly who takes up blogging like a sporadic addiction). He said that he often got carried away with his ideas and was grateful to have a journalist as a father and teachers who were supportive of his knack for writing. He was a doctor by profession, though his novels often have a sound mathematical, physical and technological background rather than end up as biological thrillers as expected.

There are a few non-fiction works and speeches if you bother to look them up, I haven't done so yet, so no point trying to give a review of any kind.

I, personally, found that his books were portals of wise insight in the pursuit of scientific advancement. However, I will always remember him for introducing me to 'an accelerated evolution of intelligence' (Prey) and of course, 'Velociraptors' (Jurassic Park).

Img. Courtesy: wikipedia

Meme: The raptor hunter shall inherit the Earth.

Semination for survival: A shit-scared view on Adam's 'Duh' theory and its implications.

2008-11-01T09:29:00.007+05:30

Recent conversations have got me thinking about the survival of the Human Race. Tnnng informed me that a significant proportion of girls would rather go for a hunk with money than the er... 'nice guy' with brains when it comes to making a real choice, rather than the idealistic, bullshit propaganda of wishing there were more nice and smart men. He obviously stated the sample space for this and without extrapolating on the observations he hoped that a much better conclusion would have been reached was he not stuck in KGP.
I was amused at the time, though this turned to alarm in the coming 2 days. Vinayak sent me a link to Scott Adam's blog entry on 'Hot Nerds' (Hahahaha! Yeah right!) where he comes to the 'Duh' theory with a simple train of thought, not unlike a man wearing two different socks might conclude that he has done something wrong but goes on to buy a new pair rather than search for the original ones. I am concerned for the geekoids, as stated before.
I, ofcourse, admire Scott and do support his ideas. But if you read that post, you'll see that rather than artificially culturing parts-for-pleasure, there is a much simpler strategy. Scott's strategy might lead to the well deserved extinction of the human race and the maggots' plan for world domination will eventually succeed; till they themselves are the targets of certain diabolical bacteria. (I like wild dogs, so I digress here)
My answer (beams proudly, though he has no clue), is to simply use 'memes'.
Consider what will happen if we keep letting things run the way they are and actually pay heed to Scott's suggestion (brilliant, prima facie, I must add).

1. Women keep sleeping with dumber yet rich and good looking men; Geeks, Nerds and the like go on to invent devices to simulate er... you know what I mean.

2. Years later, unless someone wakes up to the fact that the human race is just getting 'prettier' and dumber, the average IQ of people dips sharply. 100 then is 69 today (deliberate choice? you bet!). Geeks thin in numbers, the disparity increases, the ways of wooing women are lost in the depths of time and rotting servers. (Richness is a relative and contextual term, so don't worry about where the money is going).

3. Geeks finally go extinct. Curiosity is now a sin, GQ is the new Bible and Denny Crane is religion for men. For women, I really can't say, they screwed us over badly, they even made the ones amongst them who are sensible and smart to go extinct so I'll keep them out of the post. Materialism is rampant, and science has been mistaken to be the way of the 'Ancients'.

4. Angry monkeys attack and take over the world, annhilating humans.
You might think this will be like 'Planet of the Apes' where humans will be captive slaves, but with intelligence, they also lost sense of self preservation and the fact that they'd have to wear rags now drove them to suicide.

5. Probability wins; a 3 Km wide meteor hits the planet, wiping out intelligent life. Maggots rule, briefly. Bacteria enter the scene.

6. The sun engulfs Mercury when it expands, only extreme extremophiles survive on earth. The only other intelligent life forms in space are now getting Chuck Norris jokes.

Not a pretty scenario. Instead, what if we introduced a meme?
Memetic changes are random to some extent and memes are modified depending on anthropological factors. So, I am taking a gamble at throwing this idea out to posterity, it might become a cultural trend at some point.
Let the shallow women exist. Let them sleep with Studoids and have all the fun they want. But, if they really come to a point where they need to get another child on the planet, then your friendly neighbourhood geek might be the best thing to do. Atleast they'll boost their chances of having a smart kid and the geek will lose his virginity in the process. In the process, the human race still has some smarts left in the gene pool and might actually stop that 3Km asteroid from hitting the planet.

Meme: Memes are the new simple truths - the guy who typed this

The (New) Entrepreneur

2008-10-21T23:14:00.014+05:30

My lethargy for the past two years excused, the Entrepreneurship Cell here finally has a dedicated team for the Cell's newsletter, 'The Entrepreneur'.
This is for those who mean business and would like to start reading right away.
The posts and articles seem to be shaping up pretty well now and Wordpress (scrat! the blasphemer sspeaksss of the nemessisss' blog engine!) seems to fit well into the scheme of things so far. Have also got my hands on some more juniors to do my bidding for the writing part (takes a pause to rub hands in glee). They will eventually get to handle the publication and I'll get to yell at someone to go get my cold coffee at night while proof reading the issue. I have already thought of a coffee mug which has the words 'The Crowbar is Mightier than the Pen' with the image of a crowbar ripping through a sheet of paper printed on it. Given enough money, I'm getting one made.
Check the link given above for more news and less arbitrature.

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Hastily Twisted: A short story

2008-10-17T15:55:00.004+05:30

This was titled 'Fait Accompli' by the Spellbound contest people at TOI, Kolkata. I am still not thinking about the title, but here's the hastily typed story.

On a night like this, he would not have been out. But tonight, it was different. He knew Sheila was stealing from the tavern's earnings. He had watched her slip something under her robe on most nights; furtively watching for any witnesses in the dim light of the lanterns. She never saw him; never had any reason to expect him. But theft was not the reason for his wrath tonight.

Gridol had been the village fool for as long as he could remember. Born without limbs, it was a cruel existence in a village that took pride in a day's work for bread. A scourge of malaria left him an orphan when he was barely 19. Despite the cruelty of Fate, he found a gentle soul in Roma. For once, in his life, there was someone who didn't mock him for the innate deformities. Sheila, her elder sister, however, scornfully chided her for her taste. Roma silently heard her barks. She cared for him despite the whispers that passed through the village and he opened himself up to her. What he did not tell her was that he was not utterly immobile.

There would be nights when he was able to project his consciousness outside his person. This astral form would travel through the village, unseen, unheard, unfelt. He would go as far as the tavern's backyard, beyond which his mind would ache. He was unable to hear anything during these trips but see most things clearly. He was also able to move certain objects telekinetically with some effort. Last night as he returned to his body, he heard Roma coming up the stairs. He saw her torn clothes, the bruised face but she offered no explanations. A cackle downstairs told him that Sheila was there, with another man whose words made Gridol's blood boil in rage.

Tonight, as Sheila closed the drawer behind the bar, he glanced up at the axe hanging behind the bar and the rest was easy… He imagined the blood curdling scream that she let out before he decapitated her. Satisfied, he went to the edge of the tavern's backyard where his sight got fuzzy. He saw two shapes approaching and almost choked when he saw Roma kissing and laughing with the same man. Just after he left, she tore scraps of her dress, ruffled her hair and headed towards Gridol's house.

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Kolkata Gluttony Diary 3: Half-time!

2008-10-14T22:58:00.008+05:30

The aftermath

Pizza Hut
We left liquid graves in our wake as we left Barista and headed to City Centre next. What awaited each one of us was the promise of Pizzas at the Hut and Dollops and Baskin Robbins atleast. The journey was short and by sundown we entered Pizza Hut. Unable to sway from our pursuit of 'chicken' and still having a few shreds of hope left, we again queried, "Are you serving Chicken?"
"I'm sorry sir, we are not", came the unapologetic reply. It seemed like a reply a suicide hotline respondent might give to a rat which asked if he was serving any chocolate. Might save the rat, but won't stop it from cursing the employee.
Undettered, we still ordered for loads of garlic bread with cheese and settled for veg pizzas (Our request for 'pepperoni' was turned down by the asswipes too!)
We bit into the garlic bread just as ravenously as if we hadn't eaten anything till now. While we were busy munching away, the employees of the Hut put up one of their orchestrated jigs. A popular, yet irritating song started playing and all the employees stood in a single file, carrying out moves as well as people paid to serve but expected to dance can manage while emoting the entire gamut of expressions from 'This is stupid' to 'Time to fake-smile again' to 'Damn! I should've read that fine print' on their faces. It was hilarious and made it seem as if they were a themed diner. I still recall thinking that maybe the flu hit their business harder than it hit our palates!

Mama Mia and Kobe's
We moved on to Mama Mia's Gelato (which, besides the pizza is Italy's yet another outstanding contribution to world peace) counter which was close by... and soon, we headed for Kobe's lamb sizzlers. The ambiance at Kobe's was pleasant. They had low set tables with thick, narrow planks. Cream, plastered walls with hanging curtains of cane/bamboo (i was unable to discern which). The 5 of us ordered for 2 lamb sizzlers which were really pricey for the finished dishes.

Gelato!

Baskin Robbins.
Dessert is as much a part of the meal as the entrée. And when you have ice cream in mind, then it can be both of them. We decided to gracefully end the war we had waged against the tyranny of the H5N1 by submitting to the delights of Baskin Robbins.

PV with his double sundae

Train
The day had long drawn to a close and these were days of freedom, when the 2300 hrs deadline did not exist. It seemed to be as late as 2100 hrs when we boarded the dismal (as usual) local back to KGP. Three more hours before we hit the bed. I let the unstable rocking of the train lull me to almost a complete stupor. Using the seats as berths, we lay down, relaxed, satiated folk, unconcerned about the perturbation that the Avian flu had brought upon us. This feat was not to be repeated... not for reasons of capability, but for those of sanctity.

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Project: The 'Sandman' Compilation

2008-09-26T23:02:00.009+05:30

Just finished the 75 volumes of 'Sandman' (Neil Gaiman, DC comics). The Wikipedia article on it tells me that its the one of 3 graphic novel series to be on the New York Times Bestsellers list. The other 2 being 'Watchmen' by Alan Moore and 'The Dark Knight Returns' by Frank Miller( both read of course). Though I didn't know or care about the listings when I read them. This simple project involves posting a list of quips and dialogues from the series. I will not be posting any Wikiesh unbiased opinion in this post, I'll leave it up to those interested to explore these well spun yarns. Watch this space.

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Kolkata gluttony diary 2: The Rampaging IITian

2008-09-22T15:41:00.002+05:30

No one spoke for a while. The task at hand required a single-minded approach and any slip-ups in concentration and co-ordination would cause us to lose a few fingers, or atleast end up with bleeding ones. After about 2 minutes, we stopped our furious munching and gazed across the table with a satisfied grin stuck on our faces. Our journey to alleviate gastric boredom was going off well so far. But, lets go sequentially:
KFC
Going to KFC when there will not be any C available is pretty idiotic, but we decided to pay homage to the outlet anyway. After all, Col. Sanders had done the world a bit of a favour by making sure chicken gets fried right. (We owe you man, big time...). We still hoped that the corporation would fly down chicken from non-bird flu hit areas so that we can sink our teeth in it after the long wait, but as luck, or rather, the Finger would have it, they did not have any meat. So, we satiated our palates temporarily by eating veg burgers (a shame, i know...).

Bar-B-Que
Next on our journey was Bar-B-Que, a nice joint at park street where we went in to have a few decent preparations of mutton and pork. As we entered, the waiter asked us if we'd like Indian or Chinese... Chinese being the unanimous choice, we were directed across 3 dining halls filled with patrons. As we reached the last one serving Chinese cuisine, we settled in a nice spot in the corner under to dim yellow lights. The paper placemats on the table had scraps of information on Chinese years and the characteristics of people born under various animal years. We read out aloud each others 'supposed' characteristics twisting whatever the original meanings were while the waiter approached us with the menu cards. Sadly, the bird flu had taken its toll on the mutton and pork industry as well. Half the items on their menus were unavailable and we had to make do with 3 dishes and multiple orders. The konjee lamb was excellent, crunchy with the right amount of spice. The pork hongkong style was also succulent, and ordering two servings of it was indeed a wise move.

Flury's
Park Street is home to one of the most famous tearooms of the city: Flury's. Besides being around since the time of the Raj, it is famous for its variety of pastries, cakes and other delicacies. The 5 of us stood at its tall gates and smiled, a look of purpose writ on our faces, our hands moving in ritual circles on our anticipating stomachs. We stepped in...
We went up to the patisserie and looked about. The Chef saw our indecisiveness and asked us what we were looking for. Chaitanya sought out the Truffle:

He's not going to let us take another shot of the damn thing

While Tapas ordered the Pistachio cream and chocolate cake:

I have nothing less than pity for the readers who haven't had Lasagna in their miserable lives and I have no words to describe the preparation when it finally arrived. I'll just let this image tug at your stomach:

Barista
Now that we had indulged in lunch, a few shakes and smoothies awaited us next door at Barista. Fortunately, the place wasn't crowded and we were able to fidget and fool around till we started drinking. I preferred the Barista Cookie Crunch (see image):

I forget, unfortunately, what the others ordered, but I hope these pictures help (trying to make an earnest face without any evident sadism):

Next stop: City Centre...
Coming up: Four more joints to go!

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Bangalore Lore: first week, first impressions - 1,2

2008-06-06T19:47:00.103+05:30

IISc Main Building

Day 1:
Early
I woke up early the next day, despite going to bed late. This usually happens to everyone due to some private anticipation of excitement. My roomie, V, was also headed to the same place, but not the same lab. He had been here since 15th May, so he knew which buses to take. I did not think it was a big deal, since I was going to commute by the BMTC buses and usually they have the destination indicated on the bus... I saw a bus approaching as we stood at the bus stand, and I squinted to read the destination on the placard placed on the dashboard for commuters to read. At first I thought I was unable to read since the bus was moving too fast, but I could see the bus number (401) quite clearly...

I hadn't thought that Kannada would be the only language used by the BMTC on their destination boards. Fortunately, the numerals were not in Kannada! So I stuck to memorising [401k, 276 (!A), 273 etc]. thereafter.

The Road in front of Raman Building

I reached the lab at 0830... I peeked in to see that there was no one in sight. A shuffle nearby indicated that there was another small room near the door into which I couldn't see. I stepped into to check and saw that there was just one person in the lab. I abruptly asked," When will Prof. Chandra come to the office?"
The girl looked up, muttered, "Sorry?"
"When does Prof. Chandra usually come to the office?"
"She comes in at about 0930." was the harried reply.
I hung around, in the small room, filled with terminals at every desk. The lab had 3 A/c s in a small cluster at the end, doors made of aluminium frames and tinted glass in between. Posters were stuck on the glass panes and it seemed to reek of a work environment. I waited till about 0930, when K came in. I recognised him from his webpage and introduced myself(not something I usually do, its a social handicap, but therapy works!) Since we had corresponded and I was going to be working with him, we got down to discussing things after the inevitable but brief small talk. He told me to stick around till Prof. Chandra arrived. They had the old style keyboards in the lab. the ones which clatter sharply as you type and by this time, most members had arrived and were clattering away on their respective systems. I sat silently on the cushy chairs, swiveling while reading a book... testing basic rules of conservation of angular momentum while spinning faster as I adducted my arms and legs. At around 1130, I finally saw the door across the lab with the nameplate 'Dr. Nagasuma Chandra' was open. I got up and went in.

Basic background (no details :P)
I would be working on structural bioinformatics with K. At the outset, I was not aware of what I was expected to do and Prof. Chandra explained the task at hand in a very lucid manner. We had to map the polymorphisms in the HLA Class 1 and 2 glycoproteins which are responsible for the adaptive Immune Response in the human body. If you are really interested in the work, (which as I suspect, most of you are not and just want me to get to the part where I get my head banged into the computer screen), I probably will put up a brief synopsis sometime with some fun facts thrown in...
As it turned out, this was when I would giving my non-existent computational skills a major shot in the arm.
Initially, it seemed to be exactly the kind of thing I had expected, and thanks to wikipedia and its obsessive mass collaboration, the floodgates of information were fully opened.
I had to basically read up on the basic Immune Response strategies that are typically adopted when a pathogen or any virulent substance invades the body. When I got a bit hungry at around 1330, I stepped
out to locate chow.

A simple schematic (courtesy courses.cm.utexas.edu)

The girl in the black t-shirt.
Wandering around the few eateries in the campus, I soon realised that my lunch was going to be vegetarian till the weekends presented themselves with the chance for me to wolf down some meat. For my first meal, I walked over to the Coffee House near the entrance to IISc. On the way, I noticed that the opinions about IISc girls were mostly in the right. The prettiest girl I saw that day was wearing a black T-shirt with the debian logo in the middle and 'debian/rules' printed beneath it. A smile came on my lips almost on instinct, followed by a curt nod skywards.
I ordered 2 idlis and a medu vada and went inside with the small coupon the cashier gave me. Inside people were picking spoons out of a small steel container which had an electrical cord plugged into its base. Curious, I went over and peered into it. I saw that it was a waterbath, filled with hot water and short spoons barely sticking out of it. It was not far from sterlisation, but much better than the 3 second rinse in a tub of murky water as back in the institute.

Kusum's rolls to the rescue
V peeped into the lab at around 1830 and I packed my satchel and left for Aruna's (the lodge). I had hardly expected the first day to be one with any eureka moments followed by running down the corridor in nothing but my socks... (yes, I wore shoes to the lab even though I had to take them off each time I had to enter.) I had almost settled into the work pattern and was already devising the strategy for the next stages. Working with me was T D a 2nd yr from IIT Guwahati, who seemed like a shy girl at first, but when it was revealed that she was in love with Eric Theodore Cartman, her mentality fell fast into perspective.
As me and V walked out of the gate and reached back, we set out to explore a few decent joints to eat... I had a rabid look in my eye... making sudden darting movements towards any place that might have chicken to serve. After some wandering, we landed up at Kusum's Rolls and its permuted menu came to the rescue. For those of you who have heard of Kusum's succulent, yet affordable rolls, the name must be familiar.
As a brief description of his menu, I will simply list the items on it.
Veg Roll
Egg Roll
Paneer Roll
Chicken Roll
Liver Roll

Double Egg Roll
Double Paneer Roll
Double Chicken Roll
Double Liver Roll

Triple Egg Roll
Triple Paneer Roll
Triple Chicken Roll
Triple Liver Roll

Single Egg Single Chicken Roll
Single Egg Single Paneer Roll
Single Egg Single Liver Roll

Double Egg Single Chicken Roll
Double Egg Single Paneer Roll
Double Egg Single Liver Roll
and so on... (clearly a very long menu!) I'm going to sit down one day and permute all possible combinations and then ask him for something that sounds valid but is not on the menu!

Day2
Canine Run!
An interesting statistical study would involve finding the average size and weight of the pet dogs in Bangalore. There are only large dogs as far as I could see. In the quaint locality where I was staying, mostly people had bungalows and large dogs and as I was about to find out, they were fond of morning walks, but not morning joggers.
I woke up early the next day again, put on my running shoes and got my fat-ass on the road, bent on getting into shape and also getting a bit familiar with the few blocks around Aruna's. As I ran along the narrow roads which crossed the blocks, trying to keep track of the co-ordinates( 6th main, 5th cross, 5th main ...) , I noticed a few people in tracksuits, out walking with their ~~bears~~ dogs. They were pretty far off from where I was, but there were still some canines in the houses on the streets. An abrupt snarl followed by a loud barking from somewhere above me caught my attention (and spiked my adrenalin as well!) I saw a huge German Shepherd, standing on its hind legs in a balcony next to me. Fortunately, he was on the first floor though my heart skipped a few beats when I saw that he was not chained and simply had a small leash showing through the thick fur around his neck. If he (yes, it was a 'he') would have stood beside me, he would have come up to my waist, and his girth would be twice as mine! Luckily he showed no intentions of jumping down... (phew!) I figure millions of years of evolution feeds 'gravity' into instinct as well ( though it has failed miserably when it comes to Pomeranians , I have seen two of those jump down 6 stories of a building). I started sprinting now, more intent on getting back in one piece and not leaving a huge chunk of my being in some dog's stomach who according to his owner, "Was just trying to wrestle with you for your shiny track-pants... don't worry, he does it all the time" Yeah Right! It makes me so happy to be inducted into the 'Ravenous Dog Victims' club'!
I tried to shake off the fear and decided to run back on a circuit. No sooner than I had run a few 20 metres did I hear the barking of 2 pit-bulls. (I did not know that they were pit-bulls, but a sudden glance in the right direction confirmed my fears). Fortunately, these were chained to the gate, but their barking had roused most dogs from their siesta and they came pouring out from all directions. I knew that running faster will be futile and dogs can smell the adrenaline rush... So, i decided to do the obvious, I stopped, picked up a stick from the road and hurled it towards a stray who had come quite close to me by then... It soared over its head and all the dogs lunged towards it, frantically barking. I glanced over at the pit-bulls chained to the stake, they seemed to have lost all interest in me and held none for the stick... I had had enough of getting my heart racing for one day, so i decided to finally head back the shortest way before I fell into a situation with too many dogs and no stick to play 'fetch' with...

Random bus fares
There are even cheaper ways to travel by bus in the bus...Since the IISc gate was just 2 stops away, the official rate (I think) was Rs.5. However, depending on certain parameters like the age of the bus, the nature of the conductor and the average population density in the bus, this tariff assumes the following states:
Rs. 0 (when its too crowded and you would pay for it if reaching in and taking out the money did not mean having to deal head-first with the asphalt at 40 Km/hr)
Rs. 2 ( when the bus is dilapidated)
Rs. 3 (when the bus is not-so-dilapidated or the bus conductor just asks for 3 bucks)
Rs. 5 (When like an idiot you forget to carry change and have to fish out a tenner)

Day 2 came to a end, and before leaving I called up P P. We decided to meet the next evening, since she was off to Thailand for a full week. I hadn't met her in the past 14 years, and she had little clue what I looked like...

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Bangalore Lore: first week, first impressions- 0

2008-05-25T15:24:00.063+05:30

Day 0:
The Prodigal Intern Arrives!
In continuation with the previous post, I had arrived in Bangalore on 18th May. I was greeted by one of Dad's colleagues and her husband who stay in the city. They were nice enough to show me a bit of Bangalore and even take me to lunch (Pasta!). I realised that living in a rustic environ like Kharagpur had made me look at food prices in a whole new light! My immediate impression was "Damn this is expensive!"
I mean, if you come from a place which serves a samosa for Rs. 1.50 to a place which serves even simple Idlis for Rs. 6 its bound to hit you hard! But this exorbitance is not without reason (actually, it is, I am just being nice to the city). They might lack in quality, but they definitely make up in quantity going by the size of their food portions. Typically, a dish is enough to feed 2 people or more, ergo the 'doggie-bag' concept is well accepted here. Practically every food item, anywhere, can be 'to go'. Another very typical Bangalorian behaviour on Sunday is the 'late lunch'. Most places will be deserted till around 1400 hrs, when people start coming in droves at the local eateries. Now this leads to weird situations for a new comer. For eg.
Sunday,1330 hrs, Pizza Hut.
Me: (at the sight of empty seats) "erm, Are you open?"
Cashier Girl: (giggling) "yes sir!"
Me: "ok" (proceeded to sit down and ordered something)
1355 hrs, when my order finally arrives and I look away from the last few pages of The Selfish Gene, the Hut holds the crowd for housing a major hutment!
Me:(bewildered) "WTF just happened here?! How did it get so crowded so fast?"
Waiter Boy: "You were a bit early sir..."

The irate landlady.
The prolonged hostel renovation in IISc meant that getting a room for the internship period was out of the question. So, I had to stay in a nearby house which had been turned into a lodge of sorts for students. I do not get why they ask for a 10 month deposit in Bangalore... fortunately, I did not have to pay for it. As I entered the room, I was greeted by a thin boy, wearing a vest and shorts, playing 'Hitman 2: Silent Assassin' on his laptop. (yes, for those of you who ask me about the alias 'Agent 47' this is where you should be going, "ooh! so thats where it comes from."). V G was a 2nd yr from IIT Guwahati, clearly under the impression that biotech graduates are screwed and an IT job is on the way(Join the club...) Though, he was the very personification of simple good company, so it was hardly anything to worry about. Our room was on the 2nd floor. However, later in the night, we heard a knock on the door by a woman speaking loudly in heavily accented english. She was the landlady and the owner of the lodge and she asked us to shift our rooms. We argued that we had paid and booked this very room, so why should we shift? In response, she flared up and embarked on a long diatribe where she blamed us for having forced the poor caretaker to give us the room instead of the other one which was vacant. She had booked our room previously and had forgotten about it, but somehow that was our fault! (WTF?!) She also explained, in the same pitch and accent to us about certain rules for the lodge,
"Yu ave to come byack by yeleven in da night! Drinking waater is filled and kyept over here. (pointing towards a can filed with the municipal water supply's water) Haat waater comes from the tyimings as written on da nhotice board. The Dobi comes yevery alternyate day. He will come down but not till yor room. You cyannot use Iron in da room, if you do, thyen thyere will be a fine of Rs. undred(waving a finger towards us as if brandishing a stick). Yu can yuse yaar laaptaap, yaar chaargers." As she left, the silence echoing in her wake now that booming voice was out of my ear, me and V got down to figuring out ways to bend the rules that were so stringently laid down. No bars can hold us! No Cage! No Walls! And definitely NO IDIOTIC LODGE RULES!

Momos at 5 minutes! Pringles at 3!
The locality where I was staying was a simple yet nice one. No big shopping malls nearby, no fancy roads where people flocked in the evenings causing the traffic to actually become static. I had the following within a 5-8 minute walking radius: Nilgiris (where you get 10 buck snickers besides so many other things), Barista, CCD, Pizza Hut and a Kwality Big Bazaar with similar goods as Nilgiris. There was also a small cart in front of the Nilgiri's which served 4 delicious momos for 25 bucks (expensive, but i think we've already made that image in our heads). All this was somewhat unnerving to get used to for the first few days. In the usual case, a pang of hunger is succeeded by a short session of planning and decision making regarding the venue (and the menu), but now things had changed! No longer did I have to worry about the availability of Parle Hide and Seek Milano Cookies since 8 shops in the immediate vicinity had them stocked on their shelves, the rare urge to eat a canister of Pringles did not end with a severe compromise by eating some crappy packet of Lays, a nice quiet time with a book and some blended cold coffee simply meant a short trip to Barista instead of the particulate suspension called Nescafe ~~crappe~~ frappe and ice cream did not translate to coolfi, rollick or 3 products from Kwality Walls and Amul!

Long walks, Cool nights
After settling down on the first day, I set out to explore some of the areas nearby and see if I would need a mode of conveyance to get to my lab from my hostel. Since wikitravel's (usually unbiased) opinion of rickshaw drivers in Bangalore is nothing short of dubious, I had already made up my mind to either walk the distance or use a bus. For the first test-walk, I tried walking all the way to the nearest gate on New B.E.L road which was the closest entrance to SERC. However, as it turned out, my lab was situated at the end of some labyrinthine corridors behind the physics building in Raman building. Prof. Chandra's Lab focuses on computational biology which was all I was interested in since I figured I am as suited for wet-lab work as a fish is suited to compete in the tour de France. After 30 minutes I realised that some mode of conveyance was necessary since I was not born with Aragorn's stamina. As evening set in, it started to get cooler and overcast. Having spent last summer at KGP itself, I was deeply thankful to the guy upstairs running the code for Bangalore's weather and was amused when residents told me that Bangalore was getting hotter! (how is 30 degrees hot? When I left Kharagpur, it was already crossing 42!). I reached back well before the deadline, weary after the short excursion. Tomorrow would be the first day of work... the first step into computational biology.

The simple truths:(Murphy's Laws)
The closer the end of the semester, the higher the chances of your post-sem training being jinxed-- Murphy's law of internships

Bangalore Lore: The quiet after the storm

2008-05-20T19:18:00.015+05:30

Day -N: Praying for better coincidences.
My summer internship application was clearly a turbulent phase considering the preparation involved. I will be posting a timeline with the average heart rate during those few months soon enough. At the end of it all though, I was headed to beautiful (I hoped) Bangalore and IISc. I was dejected for a short while for not being able to go to Germany as intended, but fingering The Finger is like farting against thunder, so I got bitch-slapped by it in the end and had to frantically apply to places within the country( thats what happens when you hope too much and have a vivid imagination...). Although, when I told a few close friends, "Dude, I'm off to Bangalore, IISc for summers.", most were jubilant, for any of the following reasons:
1. They were there too!
2. "Bangalore chicks are pretty good man!"
3. "IISc chicks are pretty good man!"

I was skeptical, naturally, after being shackled to a place like IIT KGP, one loses faith in the X-Chromosome for the most part... But I was pretty happy that I had a nice project at a nice place in the country...so no biggie...
The chaos which can be called the 'pre-internship period' was not yet done with me. I had got the final offer letter in my hands on 12th May, ready to go to the Training and placement cell and tell them to change the final venue of my internship. But, in my excitement, I had forgotten that I was bound to be screwed if I kept my hopes even a bit higher than utmost dejection. As it turned out, that was Election day and the administrative staff had been called off on election duty. I could see the 1800 bucks I had paid for my ticket home going down the drain, even as I tried tooth and nail to cancel the damn ticket for the same day. As luck would have it, I was greeted by
"The chart for this train has been prepared. You cannot cancel the ticket." (AARGH!)
The usual norm is to get paid(and if you are lucky, get laid) during your internship. However, here I was, losing my folk's hard earned money before even starting off on my unpaid summer adventure!
Finally caught the flight back home on the next day. (Say what you will about Vijay Mallya, but the man knows how to make you like flying his airline!)
Spent four days at home, with all attempts at wasting time and gaining weight :P Finally, the morning of departure, Sunday the 18th had arrived. The only flight available was a Jetlite to Bangalore's HAL airport at 0620 hrs.
Even as I arrived at Bombay's lush airport, I felt something was amiss... Though, such ill thoughts were probably on account of the extreme pessimism that I had inhaled back in the campus in moments of solitary frustration. I went through the usual motions of a flight passenger till I reached the boarding gate at 0555, confident that I only had t board the flight now.
A series of painful delays, a potential lynch mob and an over apprehensive female Jetlite employee resulted in a bunch of irate passengers cramped in a small aircraft, more than 3 hours after their scheduled departure... I watched people choke on stale burgers offered on the flight while the toddler in the seat in front of mine was set to go to the moon. All he needed was some caffeine and he'd reach escape velocity if it weren't for the seat belt.
As the plane finally taxied to a stop, with the outside temperature being 29 degrees Celsius in mid-day, Bangalore seemed a promising place to spend summers...

Kolkata gluttony diary 1: the Fellowship of the H5N1

2008-03-01T17:55:00.019+05:30

Post set in Feb '08
"Lets go to Kolkata", uttering these words requires considerable effort on my part. I don't know why, perhaps my absolute, unrepentant loathing for that administrative fallacy of a place might shed some light on the matter...
But, when Tapas uttered the unholy incantation mentioned above, I did not go through the usual motions of banging my head and fists on the nearest table, getting up very fast, the rapid action causing the blood to be drained from the empty chamber above my neck and making me pass out... Desperate times called for desperate measures, so in the light of the bird flu scare, I agreed to go on a trip wading through hell, just to satiate my palate.
Unplanned trips are like unwanted pregnancies: Involve an anticipation of careless fun and intimacy, but in the end everyone regrets it, even the innocent foetus... So, nine of us agreed to leave on a Sunday morning with a plan but when it came to actually waking up and hitching the smelly pair of jeans, only five were left to go: Tapas, PV, Nishad, Chaitanya and yours truly...
Its 116 Kms to Howrah from Kharagpur, and the train journey takes about 160 minutes. We had a device to make time go faster with us; and its not that expensive these days.

Nishad (i-podded) and PV faking yawns

Chaitanya and Tapas in a stupor

Chaitanya's i-pod was used extensively between the five of us, with hardly anyone getting the absolute delight of listening to the panaromic sound effect created by plugging both ears at the same time. But, luckily for us, its time constriction powers were indeed as true as they were suspected to be. Leaving at 0800 hrs, we arrived at Howrah station and all its gets-under-your-skin filth at around 1100. The Food Plaza on the station provided a light snack for us as we ate through a few chocochip pastries to begin the day.
As you step out of Howrah station, you feel like a stupid object which is being bid on by an irate crowd of men with betel-stained mouths, peppered stubbles under the illusion that they can drive. But the experience is fun since they place outrageous tariffs for your consideration!
If a place cannot be reached by the pre-paid cab service, they can charge you anywhere between X and 3X (X = 100*f, where 0.6 <>hand -ass underwear. Almost as if reading our minds, he told us, without turning to face us, " I have to go home, which is at Girish Park, so I am charging a lot lesser than the rest." We shrugged and boarded the rickety yellow ambassador. There is no point in travelling to Kolkata with friends unless you can go on a verbal diatribe against the city (city(Bengali accent): /ˈʃɪti/ ). So, we spent the 48 seconds being driven under the intricate trusses of Howrah bridge ranting about the state of things in Kolkata. Somewhere as the discussion shifted to harmlessly abusing one another with wild gestures and fingers being pointed, the cab driver decided to play the earnest philosopher and told us, " When you point an accusing finger at someone, you usually have 3 towards you" Rather than suppressing the expected smirks and chuckles, we decided to ponder upon the ludicrousness of the statement, and Fleming's left hand rule came in handy (all puns intended)... or rather, all rules which are explained by using the hand and its finger curling abilities. We settled eventually upon the Right-hand-rule for vector cross products. So, when you accuse someone, you are also accusing the guy located in the direction perpendicular to the index finger and along the thumb. This results in a very polite and secretive way to call people the assholes they really are. Eg. You point towards your scapegoat friend and say, "Its your fault! You pathetic retard! You fallacy of evolution! Your mother should have kept her legs closed on the night of the drunken barn dance!" all the while keeping your thumb along the guy to be really blamed but cannot be confronted for reasons of his being capable of screwing your life over. Of course, to keep your index and thumb finger intact after this outburst, your friend should know that the magnitude of the vector along your index finger is infinitesimal as opposed to the one along your thumb.
As The Finger would have it, the metro was closed when we got there... so, we had no choice but to alight the famed buses of Kolkata to reach Park street. I'll give a detailed description of the buses and the transport system in Kolkata in general in another post, but for the time being, consider it like a box, on wheels, with minimal seating arrangement and motion akin to a drugged bull being branded on its rump... We got off at Esplanade and had to walk all the way to Park Street... where the real gluttony was about to begin....
Next: Kolkata gluttony diary 2: The Rampaging IITian

The Simple Truths:
Why prosper in peace when you can make everyone suffer due to vehement inaction? --- Cholbe Nath and Yesab Bandhkaropadhyay

One passport to Binge-land please.

2007-09-29T14:50:00.001+05:30

Note: This post is set in July 2007
Bombay has , fortunately, too many good eating joints. Just an excursion to locate all of these would take atleast a fortnight, a well spent fortnight at that. This post talks about a small cafe at Haji Ali... Cafe Noorani. Acknowledging the fact that most of my taste buds are dead, I hardly qualify as your typical food critic, ( I hate you, Tony Bourdain!!) but nonetheless, I still know where you get the best Chicken Hong Kong Style in the city.
This experience however wasn't a planned one. The wheels of this plan were set in motion, unknowingly, by my dear Mother and the Passport Office played a central part in the delectable sequence of events.
I know, I know, all of you are thinking, " How can the Passport Office be a part of something good, unless its a news clipping indicating that all registrations will be done online and in 5 minutes from now onwards?" But, it did play a part, even as a eager villain and reluctant patron of a succulent experience.
My brother and I had were coming out from the passport office, feeling quite flustered (which isn't surprising)... though, Fate had decided that as long as I am in the city, it shall avoid showing me The Finger. So, as providence would have it, my brother remembered that there was a really good Kebab joint nearby and we ought to try to make it a good day nonetheless (trust me, standing for 3 hours in a queue and then being abruptly turned away isn't my idea of an enjoyable afternoon)
We took the cab to Cafe Noorani, Haji Ali, and plunked ourselves in those simple looking seats in that simpler looking joint. What followed was an elaborate meal... consisting of the following:
1. Kasturi Kebab
2. Tikka Kebab
3. Tangdi Kebab
4. Reshmi Tangdi Kebab
5. One dish of chicken for the main course
6. Three parathas and two Kulchas
7. Three faloodas (Sometime in the 2nd falooda, the waiter got us the bill, and was quite stupefied when we asked him for the menu instead :D)
8. One custard serving
All of these were deliciously prepared, especially the kasturi kebab.

Despite the gastronomical extravaganza, the bill was not astronomical... after all this, it was a mere Rs. 573 (which, any Bombay resident will tell you, is really cheap!)
The waiter approached the manager at the cash counter, holding out our bill to him.
The manager, a man who seemed to be in his late fifties, had a half dour, half nonchalant look about him. He looked over the bill and asked the waiter, " How many people had this much food?" The waiter held up two fingers and pointed towards us ( by this time, we were grinning towards him).
I saw the dour look on the manager's face being replaced instantanously with one of utter incredulity and disbelief... My brother waved at him, and he saluted us with a smile...
But, the story was far from over... the Passport office was still involved. Since we had to return, the next day was an irritating one at the Passport office. Nonetheless, our work was done (Yay!), and we decided to make good of the journey yet again. Dropping by at Noorani again seemed an obvious conclusion to the afternoon...
the second day's total was the following:
1. Kasturi Kebab
2. Chilly garlic Kebab
3. Chicken Tikka Biryani
4. Two dishes of chicken for the main course.
5. Two Tandoori butter naan
6. Kulfi Falooda
7. Fried Ice-cream ( even though the name is weird, this is a very lovely dessert)
8. Special Falooda
9.Fruit bowl with Jelly and Ice cream.

again, the bill was simply Rs. 671 :D...
As a streak of sadism runs my life, the image which follows is the bill on the second day.
MUHAHAHAHA

The Simple Truths
A full stomach gives you time to think of something else... a well filled stomach gives you time to think of your next such conquest-- Food

A Drunken Chronicle

2007-09-02T19:55:00.001+05:30

I get up slowly, taking in the events between the two instances of wakefulness. Its still 0612 hrs, 5 hours since i recall sleeping. 'In the Flesh' is what I hear in the background of the silent morning commentary... though I am closer to feeling 'Comfortably Numb'. The sunlit lawn outside seems pleasant to look at... its partly cloudy, the mist is in a losing battle with the relentless sun. My eyes wander across my desk... and stop at 3 sheets of paper... the events flood back faster now... a booze treat in the wing... and me drinking just for the heck of it... 3 large Smirn0ff pegs (neat) , and one Bacardi rum (neat)... Got high for the first time, high enough to log all the effects.

"

Progressive effects of alcohol on an adult human organism

I am high and dizzy as I write this. I am getting pretty conscious of the dizzy part. I am also trying to regain complete motor control. Animal cells are highly permeable to alcohol. This causes the sluggishness, lack of co-ordination and in the most observable case, my scribbling and doodled looking words. Now, I have two choices,
1. Completely surrender to the effect as the chemical attacks my niogrostriatial pathway... turn down the lights and turn up Pink Floyd.
2.Keep struggling for control.
Either is of no consequence, so its best to chose neither... or atleast stay under the illusion of slipping on a third path. I am still logging all physiological and mental deviations till I can think straight.
Hmm, shaking my head rapidly has no effect...
By the way, this very log might seem like a construct resulting from major cellular adulteration, but, to be honest, I really wanted to this for a long time...
If its any consolation to all of you who despise me, I am in no condition to finish the maths assignment due tomorrow and unless I want the professor to read my earnest opinion on the importance of Partial Differential Equations in my life, its best to stay away from those sheets of paper.
I still have to gulp down the last few dregs of the Bacardi... The concoction in my stomach comprises of cold coffee (2 servings), Cheese flatbreads (2 pieces), 3 large , neat pegs of vodka and one large of the Bacardi.
I'm committing more typos than i ever did... Motor control seems to be fast failing. But, if anything, these effects might be fueled by my own perceptions more than the chemical itself.
This behaviour though, is not a conformist one, at least in the social sense... I'm alone in my room and trying to ignore the effects. So , i guess the chemical does have a drastic effect.
If anything , my consciousness allows a silent recorded , mental diarrhoea rather than a verbal one. I am aware of lowered inhibitions, but there is no urge to randomly utter crap, call up people, or even sms anyone.
Sound waves on the intoxicated mind have a weird effect. Your skull feels thick by now, and the music intermittently clears the stifling fog. As each burst of bass comes along, I feel the burst travel along my misfiring neurons... like a shockwave...
Its hardly prudent to look up the effects of alcohol while you are drunk. I guess, we really misuse the free net connection. It seems I am clinging on to the few bouts of rational thought.
Trying to read up on mitosis and a few other things. I am amazed at and proud of the geek inside me. Curiosity seems to be the strongest dispeller of the intoxication.
My breath doesn't seem inebriated , but my mind seems to be at a severe loss of co-ordination and under a thick cover of wool.
As I close my eyes, the eyelids fall down as if laced with lead. My head spins in a dark silence... I can no longer see the images that come up when I close my eyes"

Well, after this, there were two lines of a personal confession :P , so I guess I should stop here.

The Simple Truths
Boy who bunk class for test, find that test become discussion tutorial-- P. D Li

Academic Debacles : 1

2007-08-06T18:05:00.000+05:30

This is a fairy tale... though there is no wise-ass lesson to be learned in the end, other than the obvious fact that this post is intended to waste space and time. All of the events which follow are clearly impossible ( though , unfortunately, true) and involve a neglected computer error, a resilient batch of students, and a bunch of lazy professors.
It is 20th July, 2007... one of the characters in the tale is sitting in front of a computer and is registering himself for another set of redundant courses for the semester. The choices aren't pretty ( "climate modeling in biotechnology?Why?"), some are good though aren't available (" soft computing seems good, oh crap!, It got filled already!")... anyway, to cut a short story shorter, the registration was finished soon enough... finally the list of subjects was displayed, and our friend gets a jolt which makes him taste last night's dinner again.

PDE??!! again!!? Clearly something was amiss, a serious flaw. Our character, lets call him V, decides to consult his batch mates using the infallible medium of Gtalk. The first one was SBM...

V: Oye!, did you check the maths course?
SBM: yes, PDE right?
V: AGAIN?!
SBM: It must be that, all of our previous batches have done it.
V: but check the allotted course curriculum, we're supposed to have Matrix algebra!... dude, I can't take PDe again... I still have nightmares where Runge and Kutta are suffocating me...
SBM: But how can the allotted and assigned courses be different?...
V: I'm gonna check this out...

V, acting purely out of fear, decides that he must correct this grave injustice before the damage is permanent... He consults with all of his batch mates, none of which seem to mind the error as much as him. He decides to accept the fate, though unknown to him, things are just about to get bumpy.
Friday, 0730 hrs, criminal as it is to have a class at such an hour, its a sin if it is a mathematics class... and it was a sinful day. The oddity struck our heroes the moment they entered the class, their juniors were there as well! Now, everyone panicked... and silent murmurs of, " This can't be our class", soon went through the lecture hall. Even as they left the classroom, all of them had made up their minds, " ~~This guy can't teach~~ ~~This class is too boring~~ ~~I hate maths!~~ We need to take Matrix Algebra". Now they just had to achieve the impossible, get the academic section to change their course... fast...

The Simple Truths
If boy forgets raincoat one day, it is bound to rain that very day-- Chu Murphy

Cookies from God's own Jar

2007-06-08T21:54:00.001+05:30

What little is said about the food available in KGP is still a lot more than the nutritional value it gives the human/dog's body...
Fortunately however, the no-(no non-sense) guy introduced me to this piece of heaven on some fine day... I hope, that you have tried Parle Hide and Seek, Milano cookies... if you haven't, well then i pity you... and if you can't, even after reading this post, then i recommend that you finally make use of that length of rope in your broom closet and that fan in the bed room to make the world a better place...
Before I proceed, lets discuss this jewel of a guy who's my dear friend...
He's a member of the 'Super lame heroes' club and goes by the name of Elasto-Man.
Special powers include making your jocular vein burst when your auditory nerve transduces any piece of verbal humour he utters. More info in a later post...
his not-so-secret identity is Tapas Shrivastava... and has been corrupted by the bongs here to Tapoush( bad, i know)... and the following words shall be typed by him since he has been kind enough to lend his wit and literary skills to my blog...

The only two things that differentiates the eating habits of dogs from those of IITians in KGP are 1. Dogs know that what they are getting to eat is leftover crap and 2. They eat it by choice (quite a few of the canine species do not even sniff at the mess food which the muggus silently eat without complaining). But the owner of this blog as well as yours truly are two people who are always in search for a ray of hope in the middle of this north pole that has just entered the night phase( No!, That doesn't mean we hold up flat breads to the light and find out how many holes it has by looking for 'rays' of light--tgwtt). So one day, shocked as we were by being served a good lunch at billoo's (which otherwise is just the bill and the loo-stuff), we decided to enhance our post gluttony bonhomie, the two of us decided to walk to aunty's and have an ice-cream (assured by the fact that whatever they do, these guys cannot spoil company made ice-cream). But as it turns out, no meal can be perfect in KGP (or so we thought till then). Apparently, they were out of frozen food (local brands like rollick and coolfi not included... please note that 'frozen food' is a two word term in which the word 'food' is as important as 'frozen'). Disappointed, we decided to return to our respective rooms.

It was then that I discovered a familiar looking pack in the showcase. That was Hide and Seek Milano- something that I had had before, but forgotten what it tastes like. So myself and Mr.Wannabe-Geek (TGWTT) decide to give it a go. What followed is what TGWTT describes as 'The discovery of the decade' (and probably the only good thing that I have brought into his life- except the stud tag, and oh yeah, he is the stud of the department- or so I feel). And the part that follows shall be typed by the guy who is about to type it, and is hanging by the threads of my trousers by now in desperation of sharing this experience with y'all frickens (watch friends 9th season... you shall get this one).

TGWTT (the stud of the department): Stud: as in that rivet thing below football shoes...
If it wasn't for the fact that I was too busy hogging on the cookie crumbs , I would have fallen to my knees and looked up to the heavens and thanked God profusely for letting us know what heaven tastes like... I can still recall what it felt like when that cookie crumbled in my mouth ( All of you must be shaking your heads in pity by now, thinking to yourselves, "People remember their first kiss, this idiot remembers his first Milano cookie")...
It was a sharp feeling at first, those taste buds had long quit their jobs and were almost out of the factory... I almost didn't recognize it, for a full second... then the feeling hit me...

Well , to describe it better, I just ate another packet of the cookies all by myself... morphologically, the cookie is far from a perfect mathematical symmetry... this in itself has a charm that someone who has ridden both a Ferrari and a Mercedes can appreciate... The Ferrari has 'Character'... If some of you readers are among this selected group of people then I envy you, and if you are a girl , please gimme your number... The chaotic structure and random distribution of chocolate chips makes a man drool...( Should I eat from this side?..or maybe this?....aah) The dough is perfectly baked... brittle yet so fine that the cookie melts in your mouth before you can utter that ecstatic "Oh My God!". The chocolate chips are composed of mostly cocoa butter... (which is good, trust me on this one), and should you let one fall beyond the point of no oral return, you will die instantly due to regret.
List of places of No Oral Return:
1. The floor of the shop.
2. The sewer.
3. Someone else's open mouth( don't try retrieval unless the death of this person is filled with the promise of sadistic pleasure)
4. An IITians trousers/jeans( these aren't washed for months, and the heat makes us sweat a lot...)
5 Footwear.
6.Footwear which is worn during the accident.

And to continue with this... waitaminnit!! Oh, crap! I finished my third and last packet!...

The Simple Truths
"WHERE'S MY COOKIE JAR?!" - God asking the guy who dropped it.

RK 136

2007-06-03T09:10:00.002+05:30

As narrated to me by her:
" There doesn't pass day when I don't thank my fate for having met him. I haven't found someone with whom I could relate to as well as I do with him.
We met on a warm rainy evening... He was standing under a tin roof at a cycle shed, calmly staring in the haze of the rain... as if he could still see through the barricade of falling droplets. I was standing behind him, silently trying to avoid getting wet, I was one of those who really hate the rain... atleast before this happened. Apparently satisfied, he turned around, saw me return his gaze and smiled. And it started just like that. He came back a couple of hours later, after the rain had stopped. He returned as if he knew that I would still be standing there... he put one hand on my shoulder and his gentle touch was enough to tell me that this was going to be the beginning of something beautiful...
We spent hours together... roaming the campus together,at all of its beautiful spots, holding hands... the breeze caressing our love-flushed faces. He always let me know how much he enjoyed my company... yet, he never questioned my past... I had been with someone before, he could see that, but he never bothered to find out what had happened, and this respect for my privacy made me love him even more...
I know that I am not as beautiful as I used to be. But that never bothered him... infact he always teased his friends when their mates with all their good looks let them down frequently, failed to stay by their side when they needed it the most... while i was always close by...
The days turned to weeks and to months, I started falling sick occasionally, and even though he was getting really busy, he still took time to nurse for me back to health. He took me to most places, even when he was going to work or his classes... I didn't enter these places, and he never pressed me to accompany him inside... I waited patiently for him to return when the classes got over, and even in the teeming throngs, with all the pandemonium, he always managed to spot me in a few seconds. His friends would tease him about this... and I couldn't help blushing! Gradually, all his friends accepted and started liking me despite their initial disapproval. He stuck with me, and didn't give in to the peer pressure of letting me go for someone simply prettier. On some days some of them used to take me out, but they always asked for his permission. None of them had his gentle touch, but I think he knew that already, and trusted both me and them in his absence.
I didn't see him in the winters for a fortnight and the pain of the separation had me feeling blue again. The first thing he did when he came back was meet me, and just meeting him took care of half my troubles... It felt good to be together again...
This was also the time when on some occasions we hung out with a third friend from amongst his. But we always found more time to spend alone. I remember him surprising me one night... he took me for a really long trip, under the moonlit skies, and the open road... it was one of the most beautiful things anyone had ever done for me... He held my hands firmly for the journey, we didn't need words anymore to tell each other about how we felt... But it is not in happiness that the true mettle of a relationship lies, it is in tragedy and pain...
I had never felt so much pain, but i was shaking with it when my broken leg failed to keep me standing... He rushed by my side as soon as he found out what had happened...keeping everything aside, he took me to the nearest place where this kind of operation could be done... He stood there the whole time, clenching his jaw, as I was being operated upon... but he didn't let me go... As i stood upright once again, I saw him give an earnest smile to me... and as we walked out, I felt it deep in the recesses of my being , "It's going to be alright..."
Its been about 2 years now, and the affection has just grown stronger... I just hope I am always with him till the next 3 years that he is here... after that, we'll probably never meet... after all how far can bicycles really go?"

Thats her!! (RK136)
The simple truths:
So what if i don't have a rack, most guys still wanna ride me!-- RK 136

Pseudonyms

2007-05-21T01:30:00.000+05:30

Commonly used (at different points of time in life): Pappu, kukki(grand-dad), sonu(grand-mom), dexter(school pals), dada(brother)
Reserved for some folk: Electro-man, robo-man, Polo-boy, 303, waby, tronics-man, kuchbhee, sky-blue, see-through, vae-victus, sinha-boy, gelato-boy,bhairav, chachu, maama, calvin, champ, bond.
Derivatives: Pappesh, Pappeshwar, pappele, tattu, lattu, tattesh, tats, papps,
Pappu jasoos, pa (p) (u) [p and u can be repeated infinitely], wabyda, pappuda, pachu, paschu,

There are also some which are too profanity ridden, and are in-fact, applicable to anybody in general... so this almost completes the list of what i have been called so far.

The Simple Truths:
No point giving your name if you never get to answer to it- the guy who typed this :)

The Adventures of Gillu, the Giant Flying Squirrel

2007-05-18T23:00:00.001+05:30

Another joint venture by the guy who typed this and the no-(no non-sense) guy

Nothing has biological origins... its easier to assume (assume= make an ass of you and me) that things have their origins in this little black bag which Hall and Knight had come to love so much, and we had come to hate... random selections which by their own constructs of pseudo realities try to decide how intelligent they are...
This time however, the origins are much more complicated... because this time the origin is hinged on the concept of symmetry... Good/Evil, Yin/Yang, Baskin Robbins/coolfi... You see, sometime in the previous decade there was the birth of SF..and to take you through with the mathematics of this theory, i present the man who gave the hypothesis himself... Tapas
" Let us assume that S and F are 2 nXn invertible matrices.

for convenience, the following function indicates inverse, with the argument in the parenthesis.. inv(F)= F^-1

Then, it follows that, inv(SF) = inv(F)*inv(S)
Now, since Gillu(the flying squirrel, who is 8 metres tall and weighs a mere 1031 Kgs) hangs up-side down, from a banyan tree,
inv(F)*inv(S) = FS [Flying Squirrel], since he is one of a kind, and is our friend, we call him Gillu.
(Now for those who ask, "Why a male?", well, as it turns out, he was found in a boys hostel loo, so he's gotta be male)
to continue with our deprivation...oops i mean derivation
SF is also short for SpringFest., the name of the soc-cult fest in this institute, and despite the mathematical inverse relationship between the SF and the FS, they co-existed in harmony...
All was well, till SF invited the 'Band of Gays' to play in SF, and after they did a sound check for an hour and lip-synced their horrible songs, the FS decided that this transgression of basic human sense will not go unpunished. It was, after all, the guardian of all good sense in the institute. It ran around the nstitute, stomping on the heads of all the Core Team members and at 8 metres and 1031 kilos, even Bhati didn't stand a chance...
The legend of FS continued...as can be seen in this manuscript which was found deep in the archives of the great libraries of gmail...

tgwtt : The Guy Who Typed This.
tnnng: The no-(no non-sense) guy.

tgwtt: ***** was murdered by the flying squirrel of LLR halltnnng:squirrels are very peaceful and harmonious creatures

1:05 AM tgwtt:he was minding his own business, when a scream of exasperation from a resident of a nearby hall made the resident flying squirrel go wild

tnnng: there is but one loophole in this lame and fucked up theory

tgwtt:the squirrel attacked ***** in the loo, before he could wash it, and stomped on him

1:06 AM tnnng: ***** is in a hall called Azad hall of residence

tgwtt:since it was 8 metres tall and weighed 1031 kilos, there was no chance the guy could survive

tnnng: and so the squirrel tried to find the guy who had made it go wild

tgwtt: The flying squirrel has the powers of teleportation for those who didn't know

1:07 AM

tnnng: then ***** shat green all over his pants

but it was too late!

even his godly CV could not save the great *****

ok dude, now here's a bargain

tgwtt:shat green, and the stench drove the FS away

tnnng: lets introduce a new angle and kill kartik prabhu instead

tgwtt: prabhu is god, he is immortal by definition

1:09 AM tnnng: but he doesn't believe in the concept of god, and that lack of self-belief takes away his immortality!

tgwtt: aah! his own demise...

tnnng: so the FS

attacks the self proclaimed atheist god

1:11 AM

tgwtt: but prabhu killed himself..

tnnng: and akash ate FS to have prabhu trapped in his body

tgwtt: FS just stomps on the body

tnnng: FS curry

1:17 AM tgwtt: now that my friend...is really nuts..

tnnng: exactly

tgwtt: u didnt eat the nuts, u ate what eats the nuts

tnnng: cartman can have kenny trapped in his body

but akash cant have prabhu?

9 minutes

1:27 AM tgwtt: sorry, kahin bahar gaya tha

akash can't have prabhu, compare relative sizes

tnnng: abey yaar!

i dont want prabhu goin into bhati!

tgwtt: dark, scary place!!

tnnng: and thats the only match according to size

1:28 AM if u trust me

This is an actual Chat, any reference to any person, living or otherwise, is clearly intentional, though their deaths as imagined are obviously impossible.
As we can see, Gillu's legend had permeated the thickest of skulls, and Gillu, decided to disappear into obscurity....
This was a difficult task to do, (please check his physical statistics, in case you have no common sense, or suffer from short term memory loss)... So Gillu decided that he would wander the jungles of KGP ( the AgFE dept) after 0230 hrs for 12 years , till the SF guys finally call deep purple and metallica to perform in one of their editions. That shall be the time when the FS will return... but only to headbang with the rest of the audience at TOAT...

The Simple Truth : "Digesting Bhati is a difficult thing to do... but I shall be back!" --Gillu (Glaucomys gigantivolans)

Septuagenarian pedicurist

2007-04-20T18:10:00.001+05:30

It was one of those days when lunch was a solitary affair since i had been too lazy to go when i was asked and finally when hunger gets the best of you and your wallet has seen better notes you land up at Cheddi's in the hope of having something to fill up. I could smell the heat in the air and even clouds of dust shimmered in the distance. As i approached the rustic monument of a place, i saw the owner sitting near the front porch, and squatting in front of him, was an old woman.
I went inside, ordered the usual, and sat under the only table which received air from the fan. As i sat sipping the Mountain Dew interspersed by the regular acts of creating bubbled vortices inside it, i saw that the owner of Cheddi's was getting pedicured by the old lady, old school style!
She must have been about 60 or 70 years of age, and squatted on the ground in front of the porch. I could see the silhouettes of both of them from inside the dhaba. Her tool was a stylus with one end pointed and the other ending in a similarly sharp hook. Inadvertently, my mind formed a perspective about her... and she shattered all of that in seven minutes from that point in time. As she sat there, I could hear the owner talking to her, and it was idle banter at best... but she kept to her task and was subtly engaging the conversation just to avoid her client getting bored. Her old hands were dexterous and incredibly steady. She wore a red and white saree, with a floral pattern. Her skin was wrinkled and blackened by the sun and her mouth seemed sunken inwards.
The pedicure was drawing to a close and my meal arrived. I didn't notice her finish and sit at a table next to my own, sipping the tea, which probably was hospitably provided in lieu of her services, though not in full. I saw that her eyes were sharp, quite unlike any woman's i have seen in the city who might have even been a decade younger. They were thirty years old at most, and the contrast that her fissured, sunken visage created with them stunned me. The next blow came when she stood up... I expected a bent back, and a gait which wobbled with every second step.
As she stood upright and walked slowly towards the exit, i knew that I had seen an independent and resilient woman, a real one. She stood under the roof for a few moments before striding off into the sun and my memory...

The Simple Truths
Boy who doesn't feel hungry during lunchtime, will land up trying to think too much.
--- Sun Tzu Who

Mutated freaks of the biotech department

2007-03-24T13:14:00.001+05:30

I really hope that i don't get into the descriptive writer mode once again... But I had to do this...
Life gives you normal people , freaks, and then you have freaks who just went radioactive... enter the biotechnology department...
If anybody thinks that these are not my opinions, well, lemme tell you, it is kinda hard to type and think when you are tied to a chair, gagged, and have a trigger-happy gun-toting sodomiser waiting for a signal to either kill me or just pull the trigger... so, no apologies expected for whatever i write, and just in case you missed the point, "THESE ARE SOLELY MY OPINIONS"...
For reasons of my convenience, and none of yours, I'll go as per the roll call, might miss out on a few individuals if i don't know them that well:

1001: did not register

1002:Tokala Praneeth Kumar Raja

1003: Brajesh Kumar Bhanj Deo

1004:Bhupathi Abhilash Reddy

1005: Raj Shekhar Singh(aka Raju)... Raju is the dramatics student secretary for my hostel, is a member of the hockey and footer teams and Communique... i might have missed out on a few things, so bear with me. Raju has incredible potential for any political responsibilities and is far better connected with the seniors than i will ever be. He had an email account with the ID 'rajtheiitian'... hmmm, WTF am i then? The first person i heard saying, "frustaaps", a word from the increasingly retarded KGP lingo library.

1006: Jetty Srujan Kumar Reddy

1007: Ravi Jain... Ravi is simply known best as Ravi. A member of HTDS and a core team member of SF, Ravi represents lackadaisical style and personifies" Studaapa"... says so himself... though the name says that he shouldn't be able to understand any south Indian languages, an upbringing in that part of the country dictates otherwise... he can behave practically "Gult" sometimes, much to the annoyance of most others listening in! Can pass off any wardrobe irregularities under a wry," its style!"...He is known for his crazy antics and wilder ideas. But inspite of all the craziness, the man also can act out on social issues in anyway that he finds apt. I recall his brilliant script and acting when he penned a play at the NCC camp dealing with the social acceptance of an HIV positive individual. Some people who were there might say that it was a ploy to avoid any physical exertion, but I'll disagree. I was a part of the other play, and WE were the ones who were avoiding the torturous excercises, by coming up with lame jokes as lines for our play!!

1008: Afreen Ferdoash(aka Afro)... Afreen is one of the few girls i know who can crack PJs with the accuracy of a sniper and a computer aided feedback system... A girl with an incredible sense of humour and craziness( cmon, which girl you know will put up an avatar which was her pic after she had climbed a tree??!!)... but beneath that puckish exterior lies a muggoo as well... can really score well in the darned tests when most of the batch is grabbing in the air for ephemeral marks... Frequently utters 4 words which strike terror in the hearts of many, "Arre, ek PJ suno.."( Oye, listen to this PJ..)

1009: Keerthan Reddy Kota(aka Kitu)... I have known Keerthan longer than most of the other batch mates and he was probably the first real friend i have from down south(for any American readers, it doesn't mean that he does gangsta rap, wears as many chains as his neck can , or is African-American, i mean he is from south India, the state of Andhra Pradesh). The guy is no "gult" since he is quite well versed in Hindi, and doesn't believe in running around in packs speaking incomprehensible languages. Contrary to popular belief that south Indians don't speak Hindi well, he is pretty fluent...damn, in fact the guy listens to more Hindi songs than me!! really loves to sing, plays some mean Volleyball and is a nice person in general.craziest thing he has ever said, " Pappu, tu toh stud hai!"...like i said...

1010: Shailvee Panjiyar(aka Shall we, Shelby, Chal bey)... Shailvee , as I gather belongs to a family of KGPians. To justify that statement, here is a fact: Her elder brother is in the 4th yr over here, elder sister in 3rd, she is in the 2nd, and we have a new entrant, her younger brother, in the 1st yr... After you pick up your jaw from the floor, you may resume reading... She looks bored occasionally, and her cell phone as i suspect is a tumour once she isn't in class. That device really sticks to her ear in a few seconds after we leave the class/lab/Hell( the Chemical engg department). She's a nice girl most of the time, though she can take undue advantage of her height( or lack of it), and squeezes past our teeming throngs to the front of a voyeuristic crowd to witness deaths under a microscope.Was looking exceptionally bored the other day, so i asked, her, "looking very bored today, whats up?", "Ya, I went to Kolkata yesterday... you know how it is", no further explanations necessary

1011: Mukul Garg: Mukul is simply Mukul , The Man, the Idea Man.. coming from a business background, he is the most worldly wise of us all about most things in general. His happy attitude can be infectious at times and his Haryanvi accent makes any conversation pretty interesting!! One of the few people whom i know for sure will not waste away their lives like i will! He plans a lot for the future and at one stage was so pissed off about the state of things that he was actually considering dropping college and staying at home to handle the family business! after a really inspirational lecture," Bass yaar, ab toh maa behen ek kar denge duniya ki biotech ko badhaakar!"( Thats it dude, we'll screw the world over using biotechnology!!), ofcourse he meant well, he didn't mean any Resident Evil plans.

1012:Atul Kumar Singh: The only man who has the most shocking version of a nickname for me 'Pappu Jaasoos'( Pappu, the spy)... i do get the occasional seizures after hearing what people call me, but this one almost pushed me beyond the point of no return. Is a pretty simple chap, harmless for most occasions, though a recent upward spike in his Transport Process scores has put his ass in dire peril of being kicked to oblivion...

1013: Rishabh Jain: Rishabh is the one of the guys who changed their department at the end of the first year and landed in this dept. One of the 3 Muggeteers of the dept, he is also one of those who will surely do soemthing with his life, good, hopefully. A pretty jovial guy until you utter the words "Chemical Dept", after this, he will embark on a verbal journey of profanity ridden metaphors, and the only way to keep track of the conversation is to join in, which i do, gladly :) " Saala, Frusst kar diya ^&$*(^ ne..Yeh Chemical waale $%^%#$$@*^#(%^&amp;amp;amp;*# hain, Ek number ke (&%#@@&%" ...Rishabh after someone said anything related to Chemical engg in his vicinity.. best left untranslated.

3001: Sanjay Kumar

3002: Ullas Agarwal: Changed the dept

3003: Saurabh Kumar Pandey( aka Pondy): Saurabh is one of the few individuals who enjoys listening to rock like me... On one night, he was listening to "Rape Me" by Nirvana for a whole night in a drunken state before falling to sleep on the bed at about 6 in the morning. This man is crazy!.. i know i haven't used such a blunt description before, but it is an unavoidable truth , about as unavoidable as an elephant falling on your head with you chained to the ground with the titanium chain being no longer than a foot in length... Can utter some of the weirdest stuff you will hear. The guy is learning how to play the flute, and that fact is the butt of most of the jokes concerning his flickering love-life...don't ask me how, i won't explain :).. Is one crazy guy to hang around with...

3004: Abhinav Pallav(aka Pallav): Pallav has to the coolest guy when it comes to attitude, i have never seen anyone who has absolutely no tensions in lfe... is always seen smiling and will never take down any notes in class..it all stays in his head...needless to say, for the extreme lack of any efforts, he scores really well in the tests!Also for some reason, his muscular movements are tuned to 'Slow Motion' instead of 'Real Time'.

3005: Gourab Chatterjee(aka G Chat, GCBS): GChat is "The Stud" of the dept... the man with the most promising career, but he should refrain from finding out the colour of your underwear if you should ever enter Suman's( his best friend) room in his prescence. The guy can sing, dance, play football, act, get the marks and even the girl...like i said, A Stud!!... has the irritating trait of asking me for a treat should he ever lay his eyes upon me and the fruit stall/nescafe at the same time. He is also one of the fore-runners in the race for coming up with the most weird nick names for me( sky-blue, see through, Europe[!!], USB hub...). The only guy to secure a training in the winters of the second year! that too at a place like NCBS...asshole hasn't given anyone a treat for it!...lemme go ask him now...

3006: Shailabh Kumar(aka Shailabhkun): The man is a Bleach addict, though he doesn't have any fetishes for anything anime..atleast none that i am aware of. Plays football,cricket, gets the marks, fights for the hall, gets the girl... a Stud as well :)... coined the term" 3 muggeteers"and also a close friend of GChat. Can get ahem...weird..at times in the prescence of guys, though he has a girlfriend in the dept! i suggested a remedy for it, though he doesnt seem to be as regular at it.. cracks intolerable, unrelated PJs, there are times when you feel the need for a law which allowed atleast one murder under exteme mental distress... i think i will file a PIL for it sometime soon...

3007: some dumb guy...

3008: Shorabh Agarwal(aka Baniya): I think that this guy must be the laziest chap in the department... yup, i am giving him the honoured mantle. Claims to do all the work in the labs, in severe conflict with the aforementioned fact. If anybody out there wants to disagree, I assure you, i will kick your ass! The man has the most amazing capability to copy stuff for any assigment/lab work... its almost super-human!

3009: Alakananda Das(aka Alu, Alaka): Alaka is one of the 3 Muggeteers as well... she is probably the most revered student in the batch for her knowledge on biology. Can get marks in an unhealthily high dosage... She has got an amazing voice for singing as well. But she could use some help realising that if she wants to be a great researcher as she aspires to be in biotechnology, she will have to turn murderous with the specimens... for example the other day she said,"I can't believe we actually killed that person!", for concerned readers, the "person" was a larva of the Drosophilia melanogaster ( the fruit-fly).... I guess all of you get the point... she is also one of the members of the 'Wrong End' club...

3010: Gyan Sinha( Gyanochi sama): another anime freak, Gyan is one of the crazy-due-to-enthusiasm people in the dept. Can really slip into incoherent hysterics when uttering mildly amusing facts... Is a nice, crazy chap for most of the part. He was also responsible for leading a poor unsuspecting female to my room on the hostel day. Luckily she didn't die due to shock of witnessing my messed-up room... poor girl wouldn't have stood a chance... Well thats what you get if you want to come to my room!

3011: Syed Aimen Ali Bilgrami: Aimen is one of those peace loving people in the dept. one of the few people who can be called normal!Though a few people disagree with me on that one...tose who do, please send comments

3012: Suman Bikash Mandal(aka SBM): SBM is an asshole of the first order, though not as much as his other roomie,Chaitanya Tambay. The guy is to be pitied and envied at the same time, his girlfriend is way off in another state and most of his monthly expenses are spent on the phone bills... The guy acts, dances and gets the marks...another of the Studs of the department... He played a vital role in a video clip which involved GChat in the act of finding out the colour of another poor entrant's underwear... the video was shot by Chaitanya( asshole, like i said) and to the background of the song "balaatkaari"
He is so lazy that he carries his tooth brush to classes in the mornings and dives in the washrooms at the first chance he gets to freshen up( all unimplied innuendos can be applied)...He admitted the other day that even in a completely drunken state he told a fellow batchmate that he ...ahem...found another batch mate(male) to be cute!...i recommend the same thing for him that i told Shailabh.

3013: K M Saravana Kumar(aka Shravan): the poor chap is always under heavy stress... and occasionally resorts to faking a split-personality so that he can use abusive language freely( friggin weird , i know!!). Is really far more concerend about his future than he should be, since he is on of the 3 muggeteers, and is the first ranker of the dept. Till now, the only skills he had were those of hitting the books day and night, until recently when you occasionally see him dribbling on the basketball court...

3014: Vinay Sisodia(aka Sisodia): Vinay is one of the most interesting people in the department, considering all the interest he has for things to do in life.. though currently he is under extreme stress brought about by a certain post he holds called "journal secretary"... The guy has got one helluva blog and an amazing vocabulary.The man has a sound head on his shoulders, though there are the occasional bouts of insanity when you can go , "WTF!". He's learning French by himself amongst a few other things... and really complains about his lack of bodily weight... trust me dude, i know what it is like to have it in....ahem... some excess,( to be euphemistic)He is also one of the 3 people who changed their dept... which, as i forgot to mention, is possible only if you study hard enough and get really good grades!

The Simple Truths: If you are a student of the biotechnology department and love the subjects of the Chemical engg department, you should sit in the department freezer for 3 days till the fever passes away or you die---A biotechnology student

Boozing tales

2007-03-04T17:40:00.001+05:30

Well, this time around the title is pretty obvious. I don't know why, but i was procrastinating all blogging activities for a really long time now.
Anyway, enough of lame, unexplained excuses...
Drunken Rehearsal
This was sometime in august last year. After much excited deliberation it was decided that my friend was going to try alcohol for the first time. Consulting the more "experienced" amongst us, beer was the instrument of choice for the initiation. Eight people, two of whom were really seasoned drinkers. They had probably had so much booze in their days that i suspect they had some blood in their alcohol-stream. four were first time drinkers one was going to try the stuff the second time and one of them was there for the meal. It was a dimly lit bar, a seedy place, the kind where every breath you take in carries smoke and fumes of liquor enter your nostrils even if the glass has just water filled in it. We ordered for the meal and the booze.
My close friend was one of the Virgin Four( i know that sounded like some crappy teenage girl band, but i can't think of a better name right now). The second time drinker was having rum spiked with sprite since his first experience of beer had left a bad taste in his mouth and head. In two mugs my friend's speaking frequency doubled and so did his incoherence...he also started speaking only in English...which is not his mother or father tongue.
"This is brown chicken, and this is red chicken..but they are both chicken!...we are having chicken!"
The second timer said, "dude, I am not drunk...just a bit dizzy, but not drunk. You give me a mechanics problem and I'll solve it, that will prove that I'm not drunk!"..well actually, if you do solve it, you must be drunk!
lets call my friend as VK and me as ME....
VK: I'm not drunk, I'm acting as if I am drunk, its like some unconscious social pressure... and i feel like i can say and do anything and get away with it!
ME: Dude...I think you have had enough for the night..it is the first time
VK:You are right man...you are right...stop me now, but now i am in total control, so don't worry ( tips his glass) But i don't like feeling dizzy man!
ME: Anyway, i suppose it is time to leave now... You need to get to your play rehearsal( he was playing one of the lead roles in a portrayal of "Pygmalion")
VK: Where do we go dude? Where is life taking us all...in this bottle of alcohol...then i suppose its a dizzy place...everything spinning around
When we reach outside, VK throws up...some of which lands on his sandals
ME: Oh Crap!..wait, lemme get some water to wash it off...( i go in, buy a bottle of mineral water, come out and hand over the open bottle to VK)
VK:This won't do... Bisleri isn't good enough, one should have Aquafina to wash his sandals.
ME: (thinking) WTF?

we head to the rehearsal venue... its filled with really sober people and so far they have just noticed some erratic discrepancies in VK's behaviour, like when he squatted cross-legged on the ground when he was supposed to sit in the chair offered to him by a fellow actor, was laughing and hadn't uttered a word in any other language other than English for almost half an hour and when he really messed up a line which was supposed to come out in Victorian English by saying some thing weird in a Mumbai slang( the play did have some focus on phonetics, so i admit i noticed that deliberately). It was my first trip to their practising venue and i was there for the sole purpose of escorting VK back if he suddenly dropped to the ground.
No one noticed except for a few who guessed what had happened, and fewer who were there for the drinking session. Later, when the seniors found out it was something they were stupefied by and totally amused at the same time!

Love,Friendship and 4 storeys above the ground
This happens in the same year as the previous incident. It has more players and also a hostel rooftop to bear witness. VK(again...the man doesn't know when to quit) was just reaching that golden zone in booze-time when you are losing sense of reality slowly but you can think straight. Incidentally his school friend calls up.
VK: Why are you calling me now?
She: What? Are you in your senses?
VK: I am heavily in my senses!
She: Maratheet bol naa!( speak in Marathi)
VK: Marathi is a banned language... speak in English!
She: OK..are you drunk?
VK: Drunk?, no I'm in control( he had peed in a corner approximately 5 minutes ago on the same roof)
What followed was a really deep monologue(mostly) on what friendship is and what was that they all shared in their school days. The girl cried as VK went on relentlessly as she got overwhelmed emotionally by his words. The next day a sober man called up and apologised, though the girl said that it was a good thing that he was drunk for they would never have had that conversation!

At the same time, on that moon-lit night, on the same roof-top a guy was lying spread-eagle near a water-tank. He was there not by choice, but by circumstance and was opening his heart out to those breathing the same inebriated air as him. Lets call him AT. AT went nostalgic about the love he had in his past and what it is to lose such a wonderful feeling... joining him was MY... who cried as he recalled the days when competition didn't drive their lives and there was love, girls, more booze and freedom. I don't know what it is about alcohol, but it takes away erections in men and leaves them feeling like Socrates incarnate... everyone has his philosophical aphorisms and nostalgia to handle and share.

This guy shouldn't drink
Most people who live here will understand almost immediately about whom this article is going to be about. The guy has slept on shit-pots and peed every 1 minute for an hour in his drunken stupors. He is like USA after the 9/11 attacks...they had a no tolerance policy for terrorism, his body has a congenital no tolerance policy for alcohol, though he really loves to get high on it! On a hostel booze party he is sitting between 2 seniors and screaming his lungs out" Vodka Rocks!!!!Vodka Rocks!!..I am shouting at the top of my voice , can anybody hear me?" Ofcourse you idiot!

After a drinking binge which lasted 6 hours(!!!), him, me and my brother are headed back to the places where we need to be sober... swaying through the crowded streets of Bangalore. So far the guy I am talking about has had almost 2 full pitchers of beer,some vodka, spoken to a Swedish guy in a loo and advised him and his wife to take a trip to one of the Southern parts of the country and later bragged about talking to him.
Now he wants to take a leak. We are near what is clearly a very family restaurant. I go upstairs, holding him upright where the loos are. Before i can relax and take a breath, he shoots for the nearest wash-room and presses hard against the door. My heart skips a beat when i see a stick-man drawing on the door... wearing a skirt!
I grab his collar and say, " dude, thats a Ladies' toilet, Gents' is over there!". He bursts out laughing much to my dismay and disturbance of the patrons. On reaching it, unfortunately he applies the same force on the door for the gents toilet which now goes flying inwards and so does my friend. I jolt at the "Bang" which follows and hear a wild giggling from the toilet as he says, "It's alright! I'm alright!". Was an interesting night, it isn't everyday that you see a guy's elder sister be very cool about her completely drunken kid brother.

The Simple Truths
To really enjoy a booze party, stay sober, that way you can make a blog post out of it.--- Scribbler

Heavenly Noise

2007-01-26T12:32:00.001+05:30

A lot of people i know ask me," Dude(well, some of them don't say"dude"), why do you listen to rock?I never thought that a guy like you likes to hear rock."
I just smile....no sorry, cut that out...i keep a straight face and think of all the reasons for not kicking his ass!!
The feeling that most people who love rock music get when they are listening to it can be best described by the lyrics of Hero( Chad Kroeger and Josey Scott) "I am so high, i can hear heaven..."
We humans need music, people like us need rock... You might be a genius at something abstract, must have won awards and medals for stuff that most mortals won't even consider in their job description...ever.But if you haven't allowed your soul to ooze out of you and mingle with hundreds of others while swaying to the same tunes alongwith them , then, i have to say you are missing a wonderful experience...
I spend most of the time of the year in a place which houses the greatest variety of weirdos from the country. We have computer freaks obsessed with Elisha Cuthbert... Brilliant guys who'd have topped their departments if it were not for a wild interest in painting...Poets who will be getting degrees in engineering , eventually...guys with an amazing level of mind-body co-ordination required for dancing, but which wear checked shirts and mingle with the rest of the nerds during the day...
Most people are aware of the existence of such people in fields other than their own, and wouldn't meet anytime during their stay here were it not for one thing...
For any performance involving rock, you see this weird crowd of individuals come together...even trickle in through the crowded doors, and a solemn nod of acknowledgment is enough when spotted.
We know the feeling when a beat explodes inside your mind and dissipates out of your skull, When soundwaves travel along neurons to get hormones of ecstasy and bliss flowing through our veins. The beating of our hearts when it tries to match the pace of the music.We don't have a choice when we bang our heads against the air, thick with tunes of haze. We forget to stay in the illusion of dignity...
The pain coursing along our muscles the following morning is a reminder that atleast yesterday, of the few days that we have, was worth every ache...
The Simple Truths
Its safer to follow a lunatic who knows he's one , than a hypocrite who thinks he knows better---the guy who typed this

Geekoids v/s Studoids

2006-11-19T09:43:00.002+05:30

There are 2 kinds of humans/humanoids: those who divide people into groups and those who don't.But here we are going to go deep back into time and circle back to the future.This is when there are 2 major humanoid groups( besides the 2 above)
Geekoids:
Homo cranialis
Physical characteristics:Bent spine(though not spineless) due to years of exposure to deadly computer screen radiation.2 pairs of eyes, one pair detachable, also the primary pair.Rare organisms known to possess simply the secondary pair(Confused with Homo muscularis till they attempt to communicate).
Mental characteristics:Have higher-end brain functions enabling them to understand any earthly technology with ease.most can solve the "Rubik's cube". Some are proud about mental characteristics, some are more used to be being treated as doormats, rest are usually too lost to bother.Are unaware that simple words exist. Use abbreviations, extensively. for eg. G.E.E.K = Glorious Earthling Enhancing Knowledge.Most are star-wars fans and dream of inventing time machines.VERY vulnerable to the opposite sex( weakness higher amongst males).Can confuse an uninteresting being of the opposite sex, but a hot one nonetheless, to be a dream.
More prone to understanding and feeling the emotion of love than Studoids.
Habitat:
Any room in local residence which houses a computer/the best local gadget.Some even prefer a dreary environ called the "college laboratory".
Diet:They don't go on a diet...ever.But their chief source of malnutrition comes from Top Ramen, Maggi,Potato chips, cans of aerated drinks. All geekoids know that this diet is not healthy, yet they indulge in consuming it, which raises very subtle psychological questions about why the race prefers to indulge in self destructive activities at all levels.

Studoids:
Homo muscularis
Physical Characteristics:Thats all they have basically, physical characteristics.
Males:All 4 appendages are very strong.Primary goal for increasing strength is to hear a deep sigh from an organism of the opposite sex, followed usually by a demonstration of earth's gravity on the organism.One pair of eyes, if need for another arises, these are hidden in the form of "contact lenses".Most excel in sports and other physical activities.Get laid consistently, much to the annoyance of Geekoids.
Females:Also called "Babes".Some rare species also possess high mental characteristics.Most usually have unusually high protoplasmic concentration in the chest area.This is actually an instrument of distracting an organism of the opposite sex so that later they can use them to their purposes and after they are done, a remark about how stupid the opposite sex is puts them above any such suspicion.
Their bodies are very close to what ideal bodies should be like, though the variations are enjoyed by all organisms of the opposite sex.
Mental Characteristics:
In both sexes, any brain functions other than the primary required for survival are rarely detected.Can behave really foolish in-spite of having incredibly high levels of self-confidence.Any question like "what is Ln(i)?" usually gets mixed reactions of rage and confusion from them.
Habitat:
Any place of social gathering which has a relatively higher concentration of Studoids of the opposite sex.For a few waking hours it is also any convenient gymnasium.
Diet:
Are very diet conscious in a stupid way.They intake any diet which they believe is healthy by public opinion.Unlike the previous case, this doesn't raise any subtle questions since we know the blatant fact that they are stupid.

The Simple truths: (huuuuuuuuhhhh) Geek, I'm your Father(huuuhh)--Fart Laid her

Its Alive!!

2006-11-09T18:47:00.001+05:30

The room is dusty...clothes strewn all over as if it was just searched for a nuclear warhead, which was apparently not found.A sniffle is heard from somewhere in the corner of the room, where sits a creature, hunched, in human underwear, making a weird noise which went like "tlack, tlick, tlick, tlack, tlack...."It is aware of a presence of someone else in the room, and it turns around abruptly...its just a human, a friend of the creature, and he's come to ask the creature to accompany him for an ice-cream. The creature's favourite food, it jumps up and wears more human clothes to disguise itself...and its off to JCB...

The Electron had decided that it will gimme a lesson in time mismanagement, since that was more important than a peaceful existence...so it infected my system with a virus, both of them... try logging on to a virus infected computer(stupid closed source windows!) when u r to weak to swear at it due to sickness...naah u can't have had it that bad...ever.But the story doesn't end there...i had other obligations which involved a lot of running around after rich/crazy/authority wielding old men.It also involved learning and using office softwares to a degree i was sure was never gonna help me in life.To add to this fact was the transformation of my room to a zoo of sorts(not an aviary, just a zoo)...mice screwing around and giving birth to hopefully just more mice behind the trunk. Lizards, if ever had scared me in life, don't do so now, since we co-exist for a mutual cause...to keep my room free of a smaller and more irritating set of creatures. Since they get paid in kind, and know that I'm always short of cash, i haven't been asked for a bonus yet(thank u oh Electron, may your erratic fickle nature be my guiding darkness till maggots feed upon my flesh...)
But i could go on like this forever...3 weeks of absolute something..this something being massively frustrating and inexplicable to put down in english (limited vocab!)...i could use alphanumerics to describe my general state of mind during these past 3 weeks...but i hope you don't get the idea.
But i survived it...unlike the hero who comes out the smoldering debris waving to the cheering throngs... i scraped through with my ass on fire, and my body left with enough nerve endings to feel the pain.Never again...I'd rather spend a night configuring Linux than using PowerPoint
The Simple Truths
If you don't have time today, try again yesterday....Chronos(Thunder, lightning in background),Master of all Time

Canine Invasion!!

2006-09-26T12:17:00.001+05:30

I had just come back from another exciting journey which unravelled the mysteries of enzymatic reactions(sigh...no matter how hard i try i know that all of you can realise that this "trip" was a boring lecture...)I entered the furnace where i spend most of my waking time and all of my sleeping time, leaving the door ajar...
Any person who lives in a hostel has a characteristic behaviour upon entering his/her/it's room... you enter..take a deep breath..let out a sigh like a homecoming hero..look around your room with fast jerky movements to take in any space-time variations..and then try to relax..try to...
Well i did the same..but not necessarily in the above order.I didnt realise that i had dragged in some surprise as well...surprise entered the room..all black..did exactly what we do!!...leaving me pondering on the similarities of man ,ape and dog...i was surprised(after all that was why Surprise ahd entered the room..to surprise me)
i shooed it out..of course..there can only be 3 occupants in the room and since i had entered before the dog and was the 3rd guy i had the privilege to tell it to leave!

It did get me thinking though..as you see the dog was better off than any of us...
1.He hadnt heard of the JEE and didnt have any post exam trauma.(lucky bastard)
2.Lots of females of his species are in the campus.(Damn!!)
3.Free food!
4.He was treated like a dog as well, but didnt mind it...

So i should have felt honoured about the presence of a superior being in the room... but we humans have a lot of hubris..its a different matter that he stuck around the room door for quite some time..
If i had the time he'd probably told me some nice tales about a few bitches...thats the only way you hear nice stuff about them..
But he had to leave since i am allergic to fleas(i think..), since i hate N...
end of story...
The Simple Truths
ARF!.woof,woof,UIRFF...arf!(I have a bitch!..you don't!!)---Canis familiaris aka surprise

Vitamin G

2006-08-28T22:50:00.001+05:30

...and we're back!!! we are the letters who appear on this page...we appear in a random fashion..as chaotic as it gets...so chaotic that surprisingly we make sense..!!atleast grammatically,otherwise we'll make you read just about anything...the person who thinks he "controls"(snigger!) us is currently running out of time.....which as of now is 1:03 hrs.....he has ventured to do a project by himself,is in 2 teams of a certain technology oriented society( we hear him muttering "AI pdf....instruction set for 8052....craig" or "kraig"...whichever the case....),also he has to rely on our ancestors(written alphabets...i mean cmon...making my grandpa work when i'm fine and healthy enough!!) for a lot of things.his exams are drawing to a close...
all this means that he his going to go crazy...if he already isnt...
but from what we gather,he really doesn't have much up there....not enough grey cells.
but here he comes,thinking that he's already typed so much....and as we expect he won't bother to go through it at all....we'll play along for a while as always...and then re-arrange ourselves later so that the story makes some sense for you...

What follows is my interpretation of some experiences that i never had...but apparently, my friend has had....
In this place we get a lot of Weed( for those amongst you who are retarded surfers, WEED= Gaanja, hashish, hash, marijuana...etc...search on wikipedia if you didn't catch my drift yet...) for cheap!...infact i'd heard tales of a few liberated souls who grew the damn thing in their hostels!
Its effects are...really weird to be put simply..so i'll try my best(All this is issued in public interest for those who wanted to know what it feels like, but like myself, don't want to try it)
OK!..now confess it!..you really like looking at those psychedelic visualisations in winamp..because thats what you see when you have inhaled a few vapours too many of this thing...
My friend says," ...the road felt as if it was a cobble-stone path in some european country..i felt as if you could smack me in the face and i'd grab you and kiss you to forgive you...no worries..the world was spinning around me..and i didnt want to know if i would get off if it stopped..my bicycle felt as if it was gliding on air..bliss!..pure, sublime and relinquishing...i must have a glassy look over my eyes as when a man saw me,he started yelling ,'have a bath...have a bath!'..but it felt as if he was yelling from a mile away..or what felt like it..."
By now...i guess you must have realised that life is not what it seems..for al w know..what you feel after ingesting this substance might wel be the stuff that we need to get away from what hars us the most...ourselves...
so in response to the description, i slapped my friend hard, and he came back to his "self", which in his case is much worser than his "high self."
then there are other creatures whom i'm acquainted with, who shouldnt get high for fear of hitting the ceiling...
He's realy high now...on vodka..shouting at the top of his voice about an irrelevant travesty( something about his computer vendor...), and now the fool asks for a Joint of Ganja...the more clear minded individuals( not necessarily more sober) don't give in to his demands..they know that ths could as well kill him...but the idiot is still shouting...after 2 days... he still looks as high as ever..without the effects of Vitamin G...
The few good points in Vit G's favour are that it isnt addictive, doesnt have really damaging effects on the system....and the trips/ flights that you get are VTOL, no smooth ascent or descent...all in all...something that you can try once...
The Simple Truths
First, let me get a little high...-- towelie(south park)

should i keep walking?(part2)

2006-08-15T01:43:00.001+05:30

.....it hurts,doesn't it?to feel so close to someone, almost as if you had known each other since the beginning of time.but you are putting all that out of your head now.
all that clouds your mind is hatred...but is it hatred?...or just anger?at whom?...you feel strange that you can't get yourself to hate her for being so cold to you...
It was last summer....after enjoying a nice dance during a local event both of you were headed home...the way she threw her head back when she laughed..without any pretense...but without losing any grace.
the setting sun made her face look as if it were made of gold...her eyes would sparkle and they would hold your gaze as if there wasn't anything else in the whole world that you could look at...
the ice-cream man had his last icicle left...and both of you shared it...she teased you with it...waving it at you...running away as if meaning to be caught and punished...
NO!SHE DOESN'T CARE!SHE WAS JUST HAVING FUN WITH YOU!
but it isn't easy to convince oneself so easily
you just want to put that aside for now and think of more important matters. But nothing else is more important...ahh! There is nothing but confusion up there, the mind starts filling with chaos...you can't take your own cocktail of trampled feelings and thoughts wafting through your brain. It's too much...could this day have been any worse...
you reach your front porch...and by some strange instinct as if the Forces themselves had willed it,you turn around and look towards her door....only to see all the lights in her house off.....
you go to your kitchen....turn on the small lamp near the refrigerator....and sit in the dim light...eating a bowl of tasteless cereal...reaching to your only resort during such a situation,introspective philosophy,"if our lives are insignificant, then why do i feel as if she is the most significant part of creation?...and that i mean nothing to her..."
As you sit there brooding, a faint knock is heard on your door....your legs drag you to it in a half-dazed state...
You open the door and you get a lump in your throat...........its her!she is standing there,with a small cake in her hands.....she mocks you as you stand there glassy-eyed,clearly convinced that this is a hallucination brought upon by a state of delirium through despair..."No party tonight?",she teases.....as if you were bound to be the happiest man today...you are about to put on the lights to your living rom, when she grabs your hand."lets celebrate at my place tonight!",she suggests...now you're definitely dreaming.as you reach her house and look at the dining area you see that a nice candle-lit meal has been set up.As both of you consume her delicious cooking, again you pinch yourself...confirming now that you aren't dreaming, you begin to savour her company,listening more to what your heart says than what she seems to be telling you.....
both of you settle down in front of the fire-place with a glass of wine in your hands...
you talk for a while about pointless things,without catching each others' eye.and then suddenly she looks at you for the longest of moments.....the only sound you hear is your own blood pounding in your veins and the crackling flames dancing around the logs...she sets her glass down, you don't even remember when you kept yours down.
she moves close enough for you to look into the depths of her soul through her eyes..
she melts in your embrace as your lips gently fuse with hers....you feel a current of love surging through you as you feel her warmth on you,the layers of insecurity that you had melt away.....you feel giddy with emotions....
she tells you how much she has come to love you, and you feel much stronger about yourself...as if you can call upon a different kind of courage to face whatever adversities that life can throw at you.... just before both of you drop-off to sleep
,curled up in the same blanket,you kiss her forehead
the night fades away to light....
The Simple Truths
Boy who hasn't experienced what he claims,is like IC 741 ,only theory,no practical experience...-Electro-man

........this is not a chunk of stupidity.(part1)

2006-08-13T10:24:00.001+05:30

Imagine his scenario...you are living alone in a quiet neighbourhood...by quiet i also mean that u get to live in a house which is not a flat/aparment/etc...just a nice house with a small lawn and a picket fence..like i said a quiet, nice area...
In the house opposite to you lives a certain young woman...she is the only one in the whole world who makes you feel as if life is worth living if you can just get to see a smile on her face...over time both of you get to become good friends...and she seems more beautiful now than ever(if that was possible in the first place!)
Life goes on...and its already your birthday!you get a lot of calls, messages from all those who cared, but you didn't get the one call which really matters......
Your colleagues are planning a nice dinner...but you have never felt so alone in a crowd.their voices just wash over you..everything that you are wants to tear away from that merry atmosphere and jump into the depths of the Abyss,screaming at the top of your lungs...you feel a pain in your chest which alarms you at first, but later you accept it as you realise it for what it really is...
You abruptly tell everyone that you are leaving, and before anyone can protest you are already out into the chilly wind on the street.for a moment you question which is colder, the air that is filling your lungs and whipping around your body or her heart.unable to convince youself of either, you look up to the moon in despair, then walk along the road back to your place...
The Simple Truths
Blogger who starts becoming emotional,cannot see "the simple truths"

Salua

2006-04-14T18:19:00.001+05:30

I'll tell you some thing about this place.....just keep it to yourself though..
this place is actually an institution for the insane!! but as always madmen don't claim that they are so,ergo,the people who run these places devised an ingenious way to target the required kind of mentally challenged...they called this project as
Operation JEE
an apparently unrelated name which completely belied their true intentions.....
but raiding through the Academics section one night at about 3 in the morning(i had gone to take a leak thats all,nothing mischeivious...)i noticed something strange...
but that strange thing is of no concern to us...as i saw a perfectly normal looking computer,which hadnt been shut down!!....being the energy-conserving freak, i decided to wait for a few minutes till the operator/owner turned up and shut it down...
afetr a minute or so, i slapped my forehead hard enough to jerk myself wide awake..."this is KGP,the only people here lazier than the students are those which run the place...no one will be working at 3 am!..sorry 3;15 am!
as i moved to turn the infernal contraption off, i heard a deep, old voice somewhere,"dont do that!"(holy smokes!...could it be that someone was actually staying up the night to guard the acad section/and all its dark secrets which were already put up on the insti website..?),,but afetr sometime i realised that the situation wa much more believable..it was the computer which had talked(now , this seemed strange to many ppl to whom i told this story,but for a person who saw and loved "the matrix"...a talking computer is hardly far-fetched.....just another run-of-the-mill thingy)
it claimed to be a 486, but i suspected from the creak of its diodes that this machine was a 386,and possibly female at that(no offense to any women i know...i wanna live!!)...i chose not to notice its age,when the old hag told me that it was waiting for me to come(this seemed pretty rational too,remember Zion:the Prophecy wil be fulfilled soon..n all that stuff)...it told me that the JEE was a trap(again a fact that all of us who "took the Plunge" know to be true)
the true full-form of JEE(as the old hag said) is :
Jackass Elimination Exercise
The modusoperandi of this method is that it confuses you into believing that you are some kind of genius at mathematics, physics and chemistry. those who are not mad, don't fall for this trick as they know the TRUTH of life (which i discovered recently to be that we exist solely so that we may suffer and end up as lunch for something a million times smaller than us in size).those who are "clever"(snigger!) think that it is below their dignity to fail in this endeavour....amd they fall for it, hook,line and sinker!
After the annual "harvesting", comes the slow process of brainwashing these deluded fools.the only glitch in this method is that some times the real geniuses who got in also lose their braincells..(yeah, this is the explanation for all those out there who ask why in 50 years there hasn't been a single nobel laureate from IITs!)
Anyway...to get back...
Now the computer told me bout this another output of the experiment.....
She told me that though many of the "subjects"(cool!!i'm a specimen being studied!!i never thought i'll get so much attention!) appear to interact with this other product(almost going back to being blissfully insane!), they are not aware of its true purpose.......we do have places that somehow call to the men hidden deep in the reccesses of our dark and rotting minds.one such spot is "SALUA"......
To reach the mental state called salua...one needs to take a journey...within oneself first,followed by one along a dark unlit road..where only your own guiding light shows you the way....after you get there you can indulge in any activity that makes you forget about the things in life that people keep telling you are important.
You realise the truth that if something steals away your peace of mind then it doesn't matter.
Salua makes you forget these redundancies...you see clearly after that experience(you might not be able to stand straight,but thats a different story)
Thank God(and the electron) for such places...
The Simple Truths
Boy who wants to draw sine wave on road should first drink sake to see the locus,and then lose all focus.--Confusious(not as famous as his brother Confucius...)

Electronics and Iris.

2006-02-10T19:20:00.002+05:30

"Today was a big day....". No.Sorry! I'm not gonna say that.Had a class test today.Hah! So what?! It was an electronics class test....for the followers of "The Way of the Electron", it's hardly a big deal. Studied for just half an hour....screwed up a question though!(Damn!I knew saturation current changes with temperature!)
Also had 'IRIS' by Goo Goo Dolls playing in my head since morning!It's been playing non-stop for the past 13 hours now!(...you can't fight the tears that ain't coming...or the moment of truth in your lies...)Shit! There i go again!It's uncanny.... during the test I am thinking about how to calculate the reverse bias capacitance and instead my brain responds by giving me a 'I don't want the world to see me...'line where the correct formula should fit in. Yeah!Big help.(...yeah you bleed just to know you're alive....). I hope I didn't write these lines instead of the answers...help!

Oh, Great epitome of Duality...Oh Infinitesimal Electron! i hope i haven't disgraced your facelessness today... please forgive me,if I have,....don't abandon usss....don't push uss to the possitive protonss....they repelssss usss!! burnss uss!
Uh-huh.Sorry got carried away by faith...must get serious now.
They are coming!! They are coming!! It's the attack of the exams...they shall take our worthlessness... save your brains!(...you're the closest to heaven that i'll ever be..)
thankfully i've nothing to worry about...they can't take what i do not possess.MUHAHAHA!
The simple truths
Person who lends bicycle to unreliable fool, is a greater one-Pappu(I loved Confucius!So what if I didn't understand?)

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Don't get to know me.....

2006-02-09T00:47:00.000+05:30

Hi there!....inspite of all those ip addresses out in the universe, all those interesting websites, yet somehow u were informed of this insignificant 'lil blog.
that's probabilty for you....
any way about me.... i pass by in this world ridden with misery(by microsoft's high priced products),suffering(my fellow human beings who hate error messages) and a little happiness(can't be due to microsoft for sure..)..i am known by many names...electro-man,kuchbhee,pappu,pandu,303(3 knot 3),champ, superman, roboman(silly! i know..),waby,tattu(wtf?),poloboy,agent47... just to mention a few... you can address me as any one of these multiple beings. the only thing common to them is that they all have just one precious brain cell ...the rest form a large tumor which thankfully cant grow further.i confirmed that last bit... so you litigation-happy people can't sue me, MUHAHAHA!

The Simple Truths
When you don't have patience,a doctor you shouldn't be.-Kuchbhee(M.D,incomplete)