Netaji Subash Chandra Bose International Aitport, Kolkata.

Yes, THAT is where I am, and have to stay for the next 8 hours, so presently I'm sitting on a baggage trolley, with a limb on each of my bags, wondering how my eyelids are heavy at 11PM the ONE night that I can't afford to fall asleep!

The bright side here though is that when I ignore the obvious serial killers and masturbators who probably have a freezer filled with dead relatives at home (I do get carried away with descriptions), I can see some very interesting people here. I WOULD have done a very respectful and stereotypical post on them (the non-serial-killers) which highlighted the Indian-unity-in-diversity and used phrases like 'every boarding pass has a story behind it', but I just can't 'grab life and squeeze the juice of happiness out of it' (That is NOT a dialogue from a porno. I ACTUALLY overheard someone here say it!) because:

1. This guy here has contortion-ed himself into this very baba-ramdev-esque pose in an attempt to fall asleep on the rigidly fixed benched and failed miserably, the outcome of which is that the hairiest buttcrack in the world is being shoved (quite literally) in my face. Which admittedly, I did try to snap a picture of, in an attempt to share the sight with you people (you can NOT blame me for not wanting to go through this alone, hell it looks like Osama Bin Laden's beard!) but THAT led to some VERY awkward stares from people...

2. Every 5 minutes or so this 2 year old appears out of nowhere, slams a couple of fists on my laptop and somehow manages to push the trolley (which I happen to be sitting on) a couple of feet forward, and his mother seems to think that an adequate answer to my look of wtf-ness is "ohh he's such a little gadget freak.". Yes it's THAT easy for parents to mask their childs pain-in-the-ass-ness as a hint of genius.

3. There's a stray dog at the airport, and it's not really harmed me or anything and it's quite cute in fact, but it's a stray dog and it's INSIDE an airport!

4. I'm more half way through and I STILL have no idea what this post should be about exactly. (The aimlessness is sort of  captured by the excessive use of parenthesis and CAPITALS.)

5. I'm REALLY getting vary of the amount of lists I use in posts!

6. Now I'm just overdoing it!

Well at least I spend the next 3 weeks working in Bangalore, which does sort of promise to give me a shot at independence and self reliance along with some nice time with the elusive girlfriend, here's hoping it makes me shed the cynicism and get a 'grip on life' and make me want to change the world etc...

More on Bangalore later...

P.S. Yes, I tried very very hard to ignore the awkwardness of the fact that 5 months (4 of which involved me, college, Assam and interviews) seperate this post and the one preceding it.

P.P.S. A$@#$@%  Cute little gadget-freak kid just made me drop my laptop!

Me.

Of travelouges and apparent threats...

Okay, fine, my last post was every bit as vague and meaningless as the stuff I spoke about here, and I do agree that blogposts which have 5 words and one picture-that-doesn't-even-fit-in, rank right between Delhi-Autowalas and Satan in the list of all time evils, so yeah, I DO come across as quite a hypocrite with my last tweet-looking post, but it's just so tempting to throw around a random picture and a random caption and try to cover up your guilt for not being regular!

Anyway, my internship in Hong Kong is coming to a close, and in 4 days I should be back in my hostel room coming to terms yet again with the sheer lack of civilization around me, all while going through the dozen or so books on 'Distributed Computing' which my mentor has been kind enough to 'gift' (Somehow the word means less and less as you grow up :(, ) me.

I didn't do great on the updates from a foreign land bit even though I sat down a couple of times and tried to come up with one of those usual "had nice time and I met some really nice people" kind of travel memoirs, I just couldn't pull it off, partially because I'm not really great at understanding and appreciating cultures/people/cuisine/trafic-rules/table-manners etc that deviate from my usual palate. I know everyone feels uncomfortable with a change of surroundings, and I know it's not like everyone is an Ian Wright (Read: the guy you saw eating raw goat-testicles, yak-tongues etc as he 'traveled' all over those Himalayan villages, on the Discovery Channel about 10 years ago) incarnate, but I bet they wouldn't fall asleep listening to music during a city-tour (Yes, THAT happened.) Luckily though I did manage to summarize the interesting parts of the past 2 months with:

1. Chowmein is NOT a Chinese dish, you do NOT get it in most of Asia, but you do get ludicrous stares if you ask people for it's availability. (Ditto with any 'Chinese' thing you might have eaten on Delhi streets.)

2. If you have ever seen any of those 'traditionally Asian' dishes on Travel and Living and expected to like any of them, then you're WRONG, they ALL taste the same (Take [insert meat] boil for [insert time].)

3. That snooty friend of yours who's probably told you about how chopsticks are easy to use and how they are, in fact more convenient than western cutlery, has played a cruel joke on you indeed. Ask him/her to try eating rice and tofu with them.

Yeah, 2 months in 3 sentences, ALL revolving around food. So I guess when I said I'm not great at understanding and appreciating new places, I meant it. :)

Me.

PS. When I woke up today I found this note pasted to the door of my apartment.....




.... so I leave now as I rush to get it translated from someone, as it's kind of unsettling to see so many exclamation marks, which I'm sure prettymuch mean the same thing in every language!

Not yet a blade of grass...

but getting there...

P.S. I DO hate being so blank, but somehow I'm growing quite fond of the randomness.

22° 15' N, 114° 10' E

You know you need to start blogging with a vengeance again when.

1. Your blog has 3 posts in the past year.

2. Almost ALL posts begin with an explanation of how you just ‘haven’t’ been able to write

3. You consistently get ‘welcome back' comments, sometimes on consecutive posts.( Yeah THAT is how far apart my ‘second-comings’ are.)

4. You forget your blogger password and after abusing yourself for not using gmail like normal people, you go through a slew of security crap to reclaim you account.

5. You start posts with pointless lists, because you’ve pretty much forgotten what you used to write about.

6. You want those lists to end on even numbers. (Doesn’t really fit here, but I think it’s self explanatory)

So here I am, hopefully with a new hope and a chance at redemption (It’s kind of cool how I’m making this sound like an 80’s Amitabh Bachchan movie, all I need now is a frail ailing mother and a close confidant who ends up being in league the evil politician/police-commissioner /drug-lord.)

Will definitely write more often now, I’m in Hong Kong for this month and a half anyway,(Yes the title gives the latitude and longitude, yes that IS weirdly geeky), so yeah let’s see if I can pull off the ‘in a foreign land’ bit on my blog. In case I can't, I swear I’ll compensate by adding some close-up high-def pictures of a tree/butterfly/blade-of-grass (apparently THAT’s cool, oh and even though I ALWAYS find it lame when people upload photographs in which they’re standing next to buildings/cars/dolphins/etc in [insert country name], I’ll probably do that too) right after I save enough from my salary to buy a camera (I’m going through a very ‘khuddar’ phase after my phone and camera were STOLEN from my room in college, actually, the ‘khuddar’ part is just to make me feel better about my parents not trusting me enough to spend money on me anymore.:))

Have already spent two weeks here, nothing much to state, except for how my room is barely the size of a double-bed and that I usually have a very Sheldon-Cooper-esque white board in front of me, oh and the food is pretty much plain rice with boiled stuff.

Later,

Me.

P.S. Update on the last post, it seems like Anonymous might just not get married this year. :|

Your platypuses belong to me...

This is when I feel lost for words. Somehow, posting here has become a different experience for quite sometime (read: years). The silver lining here though, is that this time, I have a little bit to dish out on a couple of things, which frankly is an improvement over most of what I've penned down using my usual strategy of basically writing anything in a post and then praying for universal appreciation. (Works better than you can imagine, ask my readers reader :))

Anyway, this family friend of mine is getting married, and yes people get married ALL the time (Quite literally in fact), but considering how most of my older cousins had kids before I could walk (It's actually quite disturbing when I put it that way), I had till now been denied a bunker post at weddings, thus this is my first time in the marriage limelight, where you know, you hang out with the groom and do the cool things like drive people around, throw bachelor parties and give stupid advise but get away with it like grownups do (like 'Banquet halls are jam packed in Jan, you should try to get a wedding date that is less congested....' or 'Don't get drunk on your wedding'). So we fast forward to this conversation I had with him, in which I COULD have said:

"Hey, we'll have a REAL bachelor party, like the one from [insert sit-com name]."

OR

"Hey, did you catch the match last night?"

OR even

"Hey, vengeance is not a virtue."

but what I did say was:

"Hey, you know how our parents talk about the time they got married , THAT is where you are now! By the time I pass out of college, you'll have kids!"

I always thought that " 'Wrong' is one of those concepts that depends on witnesses", clearly I was mistaken, Let's just say my discussion with him escalated into something that quite reminded me of the ones I used to have with my parents when they were at the if-you-don't-shout-at-your-teenager-he-will-NOT-get-into-college-and-DO-drugs stage. Apparently some cows ARE too holy.

I WOULD have thrown follow-ups here, maybe even summarized with a happy ending, but he has sort of stopped taking my calls, and my dad just told me that "his wedding might just be postponed for sometime", hence this time I conclude while praying for these incidents to be non-related. Somehow the wedding limelight isn't as much fun as it was made out to be.

Me.

P.S. I had completely forgotten how cool stupid titles to posts sound, and Yeah, I DID make a conscious effort to cut down on the 'Well'...

A simpler life...

Okay, so its been a long time, its almost like finding a long lost friend, I guess I owe an explanation to some followers of my blog (that is if they haven't given up already ), well I had nothing to write about. And I know THAT's never stopped me from forcing my opinion on you in the past (and it isn't exactly stopping me right now..), but well, I just couldn't get myself to write here, no matter how many times I sat down on Blogger, I WOULD have called it writer's block but that's just crap, anyway, call it what you may, but weird absences like these tend to kill your position in the blog-verse ( I CAN'T believe I'm using words like this).

Well, I was just going through my previous posts, from three years ago, and that just reminded me about how much I loved my blog, and writing, well I wasn't exactly Alfred Lord Tennyson and nor was I regular, but yeah, things seemed so different when I was seventeen, I'm not exactly 80 right now, and it's not like I've accumulated a LOT of wisdom and led a content life (only characters in fairy tales do that) but there's something about being told how you were "Organized and diligent before college, and now you look like a laid-back hippie" by your mother (She does that, a LOT) that really makes you wonder.

Well there were no flabbergasting moments, but it was fun to see how I could actually write stuff about the 'Large Hadron Collider'! And the amount of exclamations I used! (This is fun!!) And how I felt nostalgic. Well I always found growing up to be over rated, hated people a few years elder to me giving me advice as if a couple of extra orbits around the sun puts them on a pedestal high above me, so it suprised me as to how it was kind of true.

I don't think that I've learnt things over the last three years (well except for what to do when you're in the middle of an empty road at 4 am and a stranger comes out of nowhere pulls out a gun, yeah THAT happened, but that's another story.) and I certainly haven't amassed a stellar amount of wisdom, but I know I've changed. It might be subtly and in meager amounts, but that's still not a nice feeling. I'm not exactly reminiscing the innocent joys of childhood (I wasn't exactly a cattle herder when I was young), but it's an uneasy feeling to know that life does mold you over time, and that you don't exactly need a series of life altering events to alter your life.

Really miss Delhi, miss school, miss the 13 year old pattern my life was based on back then...

I end abruptly hoping that you'll pause to think about how life's taken a toll on you (well basically , that you'll over analyse this post, start seeing things that aren't written and make out a lot of depth, which practically isn't there. :) ) People tend to be over analytical when thinking about their lives.

Learnt that the hard way.

P.S. Change sucks.
Me