The albatross and the tangerine.

6 years and 1283791273 drafts later!

It's not like I haven't tried blogging, but it's been so hard. It's almost as if there's a nagging high pitched voice in my head (sounds like my high school english teacher... probably something I should unpack in therapy). Which keeps telling me that I've already written everything that's on my mind right now.

And while all my dating profiles mention how I have 'varied interests and opinions' (and that 'blogging' is an interest), I feel really lost for thoughts every-time I sit in front of the familiar blogger UI. All I can mostly think of is.

1. Writing is harder now. (But I've written about that)

2. It's been so long since I wrote last. (Done that too. Like. A. Hundred. Times.)

3. Writing a post about the stuff I wanted to write about. That's what this post is about. (aaaaand of course, I've written about that too!)
4. Wanting lists to end on even numbers. (Hafta admit, this isn't that bad, I've always hated the number 3)

If only I had a niche growing up, like - [making lego blocks / writing BS trivia on Quora / anal bleaching],  I'm sure I would have been MUCH more consistent here. In fact, I'd probably be on YouTube by now, selling people finance courses to people and asking them to "Like, Subscribe, Click the bell icon."  OR calling myself a 'Visionary thought leader' on Linkedin

Come to think of it, I was creating content (questionable in quality? Yes.  but have you seen what the thought leaders do?!) before the creator economy was even a thing! When some of the kids that ask me to "Like, subscribe...etc" today were in diapers. And tbh, that's the only thing I can say to the voice in my head.

This blog and the people I met here have been really special.  And yes, there's some regret that I won't get checkins via comments from the old gang. But they are still very much a part of me, we did kinda grow up together. (Who knows, maybe some of them are actual visionary thought leaders?).  

There are no goodbyes for us. Wherever you are, you will always be in my heart.  - Gandhi

Khuda haafiz.
- Me

PS: Can't believe I quoted Gandhi and referenced anal bleaching in the same post!

Horn OK Please.

So the 17 year old who started this blog is 25, and he hasn't written words-that-aren't-part-of-coding-syntaxes in a long time, so he might just be rusty. The bright side though, is that no one's here any more, all the action is at Wordpress Tumblr Quora Medium. So just in case you're a teen  who stumbled across this post, don't judge me, but THAT is how much of an old timer I am. Also, the 140'th character is long gone so you can stop now.  Just kidding, your generation doesn't read tweets. It sexts on snapchat.

Trust me, its beyond scary to think, that I could write better when I was a 17 year old. What if it's not just the lack of practice? What if it's because I had, gasp, more clarity of thought? THAT is saying something, mainly because then, judging by my posts from 2008, my thought process, could be summarised by:

1. Wanting to get laid.
2. Hoping dad lets me drive.
3. Trying to sneak alcohol from someplace.

1. Drunken sex, while driving.

Admittedly, ^that seems like an enticing  thought now too,  but I hope you get my point.

I can only conclude this post as I resolve to wait and see if  future correspondence (yeah, it's coming baby) clears the self doubts.

PS: Till then I'll just go the easy way and submit my will to the blogging gods.
PPS: Hope they also answer drunken-sex-driving prayers.

Me.

Darr

8:10 PM: On a cold December night an innocent 6 year old incessantly flips through channels on his remote, until a stellar recreation of the visible universe jumps out at him from his television set and changes his life forever. Well yes you see the usual stars-and-space-blah ALL the time on the Discovery Channel (which is the channel we're talking about).

8:29 PM: The narrator probably said something to the tune of "In 5 billion years, as the Sun nears completion of it's lifetime, it's diameter will expand and it will engulf the very solarsystem that it would have nurtured for the past 10 billion years." *The end*.

Simple enough. But unfortunately, thanks the concept of dubbing to reach a wider audience what the 6 year old sitting in his New Delhi house gets to hear is "5 arab saal mein sooraj, dharti ko nigal jayega" and on cue, the friendly animated Discovery Channel Sun turns a monstrous red and happily expands to take up the entire screen.

The Earth is no more.  The boy stares at the screen in a state of shock. Credits roll.

Sleep eludes him for the next couple of nights which he spends with folded arms praying for the safety of his family.

In a couple of days he will come to understand that "5 arab saal" actually means 5 billion years or 50 million lifetimes (200 million if you live in Nigeria.) (Who the hell knows what arab means anyway?  Isn't that a race? When did it become a Number?)

I know kids get scared of random things all the time, but this was different. For starters it happened 19 years ago. Also, I was the innocent 6 year old.

I remember reiterating this story to my school counselor asked me to list down "when you've been scared" when I was in the 6th. Needless to say she couldn't hide her disappointment. (Newsflash: Not everyone is molested by their private tutors.) (Also, who discusses fear with 12 year olds?)

Though, I eventually came up with better (read: socially acceptable to relay) fearful incidents, "Two of us were chased by 20 people on the streets of Guwahati" etc. When I think of fear, it always, on cue, takes me back to those nights in my blanket 19 years ago.

Granted, that by then the only thing I'd thought of twice was how much of a bitch the letter 'R' is to write in cursive, but something from that night has still carried over with me, even though if it's in the form a deep dislike for counting in Hindi (and Urdu by extension) and hatred for the voice of that evil Discovery Channel Hindi dub artist. (He's still there! Or maybe, Hindi voice overlay artists just sounds the same.)

Anyway,
Me.

PS: Yes, that post ended abruptly.

Reincarnation.

Hello world. Kaise ho?

Okay, so 2 years and 6 months, yeah, I know mammals with shorter lifespans. Considering that anyone who ever read my blog has probably moved on to greener pastures, like LinkedIn posts,  Facebook Photography pages  or raising kids, this does seem like starting anew.

Basically, this is what my side of the universe has been buzzing with:

1. I grew up, left college.
2. I got a Job.
3. Then I quit it.
4. Also I started something of my own.
5. I haven't really learnt how to drive yet.
6. Oh, and I still like it when lists end with even numbers.

I do get that I'm slightly rusty while posting stuff that isn't accompanied with a meme, but then again, I did learn quite quickly after my first couple of blog posts, where i usd 2 typ lyk dis. Here's hoping I'm still as quick on the uptake ( I should be, cause: 7. I got into MENSA, and yes, I did think of a way to sneak that in.)

Reincarnation it is.
Me.

PS: There's still something about writing here that makes me feel 17 again. :)

The theory of everything.

 

The age of rocks vs The rock of ages

THIS is what one should not be spending time doodling on walls 8 hours before a Distributed Computing end-semester examination when you have 1000+ pages left and to top it all you're down with dengue.

Fml.
Me

Women101

Firstly I’m in Calcutta, basically to load up on some mata-pita ka pyaar before I go back to the Assam ki vadiyan  which are waiting for me. I turn to my cool little blog to while away the next couple of hours, the pretext being that it’s 2 AM, my flight for  Guwahati is in 4 hours and  my parents flew away on a jet plane 6 hours ago. Anyway, I was told by someone that my blog usually is some sort of glorified amalgamation of kiddishness and cynicism and I should try something new before actually judging people whose writings are a confluence of meaning and contemplations, and here it goes.

Note: Do tell me if it gets a tad bit boring, then next time I can write poems! :)

Okay, it’s about 2 women I know. One’s barely a college student while the other’s a working independent executive staying alone in a new city in her mid twenties let’s call them A and B (clearly, I’m NOT that great with story telling). About a year ago, I broke up (she prefers to use the phrase ‘dumped her the second time’) with A. There were circumstances and loads of other factors at play but I think THAT will suffice. Anyway, a couple of months later I realized that I made a mistake, and sort off did the stereotypical running around like a puppy, she wanted none of it. I guess she realized ‘she was happy earlier but she’s happier now’. Enter B. SHE was is was is my friends girlfriend.  I spoke to her for quite a bit, she was going through a rough patch with her paramour and did advise me to go all hopeless romantic on mine. Though her suggestions did fall flat, it was fun to know I could actually pull off the filmy things for someone. After a month or so, we realized that it was not happening, we cursed A, laughed a bit on how idiotic some of my actions were. She let me on to a bit of her fucked-up-ness and that was that. This blog post would have ended here had I not got a phonecall from B yesterday.

Basically, my friend realized he was screwing up, called her up, apologized and tried to  get things back to normal again, but THAT is when things get interesting. Speaking to her just took me back to my conversations with A from 6 months ago. What was really remarkable was that I was literally hearing the same dialogues, I mean ‘I was a doormat’, ‘I need time for myself now’, ‘I was obcessed with him earlier but now I’ll obsess over work’ . It was EXACTLY the same rhetoric. And THEY were coming from someone who was basically my Valakyrie of hopeless romance. I didn’t exactly know how to reason with her, so I heard her out. Cut the phone. And here I am. I guess most of this post makes me sound like some weird cynic who’s cursing women and who even Gandhi would advocate burning alive, but it really is not so. I’ve been friends with both of them, seen them through very weird times, heard them cry etc, and I really REALLY believe that it is for the better that they’re not blindly following someone who put them in that predicament, but what’s fascinating is that, this hulking up didn’t happen when they were in that state of ‘unspeakable pain’ it happened when they were finally going to get the compromise that they were craving for months. I know both of them might not like me hyphenating them with eachother or summarizing stuff with a sentence. But it’s just so obvious. I guess people, women even more so are hardwired to appreciate what they have to work towards (Yeah, so if you’re one of those ‘serial likers’ on facebook, it’s NOT going to help.)

I guess I FINALLY know why people adopt the ‘women are sex objects’ attitude, cause it probably works better, but I guess it’s just one of those things in life that makes your jaw drop. This post isn’t meant to be some sort off killer guide to women, but as that friend of mine is going to realize very VERY soon it’s true, in facts and in surmise. It does seem like that double date I planned with him a year ago clearly isn’t happening.

Anyway, I’ll get some sleep leaving you with my co-author for tonight....

THIS is Partho Dada, sadly I couldn’t completely do justice to his points on this topic due to my rustic Bengali, but yeah we did end up making some amazing Macher Jhol for dinner. I COULD have just gone clubbing on my last night in Kolkata, but this was just so much better. :)

P.S.    I’m kinda psyched about my first date in almost a year!
Me

Teletubbies.

Just got the answer-script for a course I have this semester called Optimization. If you've done linear programming in school it's just like that on steroids and multiple dimensions. Anyway, due to a substantial lack of attendance I was compelled to come up with my own method to attempt the exam, I remember walking out of the examination hall feeling all full of myself and prodigious but THIS is how my answer in the one question exam was marked.

'"Wrong" procedure, in the sense Not (sic) taught in class. Don't be Prof Einstein.'

I guess there's a reason why the course was not called 'Innovative Optimization'.

Aargh. 

Me.

P.S. Yeah the handwriting's always sucked. :)

P.P.S. And I DID give up on meaningful titles a while back.

Independence Day!

Okay, I'm in Calcutta, primarily because someone really close to me is admitted in a hospital and the Doctors used the words 'biopsy' and 'cancer' in the same sentence a couple of times, and as my only experience with the word 'cancer' has come through movies, where in the best case scenario it's used as a plot device to kill off important characters and 'motivate' the protagonist, I can clearly state that the last few days have been daunting. Well thankfully the biopsy results were negative for cancerous growth so now I can just curse the doctors and get some sleep. :)

I'll leave you with what I ran into on my way to Calcutta when I got off at some random railway station (you know, the ones that have like one platform and look like a crime-scene) to look for something to eat: 

Sorry for the picture quality but it's hard to snap clear pictures when you see a guy with THAT hairstyle in the dead of the night and the middle of nowhere amidst a very VERY conspicuous stench of cannabis. They were probably just praying or something but somehow I couldn't take the words 'Human Sacrifice' out of my head. :)

Me.
P.S. This post is probably a little disconnected. Need Sleep.

 

Ta da!

Pardon the enthusiasm apparent from the title, We'll I haven't blogged with such consistency since 4-odd years ago, I guess there ARE some similarities between the last year of college and the last year of school but I might also be motivated by the fact that a month or so ago, one of my cousins started this food-centered blog, and she ALREADY has more followers than me (by more than a factor of 10!) I would have put a link to her blog, but that would just lead her back to here.

Ah well, I guess not being particularly good at something in this world which is centered around interest groups does sort off make you wish you were born into tribe that talks in clicks. So yeah, I've clearly lost to my sister, the Valkyrie of culinary literature, but this is about me and MY life, brace yourself. 

I remember a quote that I came up with some time ago, (and also acted quite smug about. yeah I do THAT) "You don't need a series of life altering events to alter your life." Well, for the past 6 odd months, I've had nothing BUT 'life altering events', that go from cracking ribs, run-ins with cops, major career-threatening fuckups at college, over-the-top dramatic heartbreak and almost single-handedly messing up the lives of two close friends. So yeah, you might not need life altering events to alter your life but they sure tend to speed up the process when they occur.

I hope haven't really reached a 'self proclaimed motivational speaker' on the annoying-persona scale, but I did come up with a kick ass analogy. Try answering this:

What'll happen if you take a shot of [insert desired drink] for all those things in life that have turned out worse than you expected them to?

a. I'll be staring sober at an unused glass and a filled bottle.

b. I'll be tipsy.

c. I'll be [insert expletive] drunk.

d. I'll be dead from alcohol poisoning before midnight.

Let's face it, the odds of you meeting a genie as she tap-dances down a rainbow and grants you 3 wishes are probably more than you choosing (a), in all probability you'll be somewhere between (c) and (d), and that my friends, is exactly what's wrong with the world. It's in the definitions of 'expected' and 'worse'. I can't give you solutions or answers but here's hoping I gave you perspective. :)

And in case the last paragraph reminded you of how much trauma you've had to face in life (well it DID intend to!) Here's something that'll make you feel good about yourself. Try taking this personality test, which I remember from my last sems psychology course, it really craps out amazing personality types which serve to remind you how psychology is the perfect pseudo-intellectual equivalent of a horoscope (only here, you won't be unlucky to be born a Virgo or something). Anyway this is what it thought I was. [NOTE: Takes 15 odd minutes]

I would have continued to rant on, but I'm sort off in the middle of setting up my room, that might just take a while, it looked like this till 2 days ago. :)

 

Me.

P.S. From now on I'm totally blogging as often as I used to, also with labels! (In your face uber-successful-blogger-sister!)

P.P.S. Don't judge the room. :)

A pinch of salt, and a lot of Pepper.

Okay, this post will probably make me sound like an 11 year old with a morbid belief in happy endings, and a complete ignorance of death. There are no witty one-liners today, no crazy metaphors, no lists and nothing that can be directly interpreted as, you know, happiness.

A couple of days ago, I came across a three legged pup, outside this swanky Bangalore hotel, I noticed her primarily when I saw the nice Virappan-looking guard kicking her to keep her away from the gate, maybe to make sure she didn't disgust the up-market 5-star guests that were probably scheduled to come. Anyway, I picked her up, walked a couple of kilometers and dropped her at what seems to be the ONLY animal shelter in Bangalore, well considering that I don't routinely qualify as a nice-human-being, and I do have a lot of things weighing down on my conscience, it did feel extra special to have actually done something that would have added to my share of positive Karma. That's when things got interesting.

The kick ass animal shelter people, who I had gladly outsourced my positive Karma to, just called me yesterday to tell me that her leg's damaged beyond repair, because some car or something's probably run her over, so they can't use her with the rest of the shelter dogs (who they take to play with autistic children apparently.) I can if I choose to, somehow drop her back where I found her, so that she can be kicked around a little more , because if no one takes her back in sometime, they'll 'put her to sleep'. 

So, my tryst with positive karma turned out to be a sham, and the person I 'saved' is in fact going to die. I mean, yeah it might be for the better etc, but it's just hard to imagine that something that barely reaches up to your ankle, and spent the better part your association with her crying in your arms, is going to that big dog house up there. So here I am, thinking of stuff in retrospect amazed at how the difference between 'having good intentions' and 'doing good deeds' is frighteningly clear now. 

I don't know what's the right thing to do, or why this is messing me up so much, but I sort off liked knowing that I did a cool selfless thing, sometimes life's a bitch even to 'bitches'.

P.S. Pepper is what I used to call her, on hindsight it seems weird that I gave a name to a puppy who I'd met for like 3 hours, but I guess I probably picked that up from a very benign (read: intolerable) soul.

3:56:27 AM. Bangalore, India.

I know I'm starting this post like it's a diary entry for a character in Lost, but it 3:56 AM and I'm still at work, writing a report that summarizes my internship in Bangalore. And considering I'm whiling away my time on blogger as the cursor blinks idly on an empty word document at my Desktop, I COULD have been a tad bit more motivated.

Anyway, something about the inevitable end to my Bangalore stint drew me to writing this down. It's been a long 3-ish months, and I've admittedly had an eventful time. Here are the highlights:

1. I finally found someone willing to tag along with me to Lahore! Well, yeah, I'll get into more detail about this sometime in the future, right now we can just summarize it with the fact that I do have a very filmy connection with Pakistan, which also involves a death-bed promise to visit an ancestral home made to the most important woman ever in my life, my dadi. :)

2. I learnt that going out for a couple of beers at lunch makes work a lot more tolerable. :)

3. I realized EXACTLY how much I hate Bollywood, basically how popular culture makes you think of yourself as the lead of your own movie. Where you know, you get the happy endings, and your giving it all away for one thing isn't ridiculed or slandered. The DDLJ moments don't really translate that well into real life. If there's one thing Bollywood loves doing, it's trying to convince you that it's wise to ignore your responsibilities in favor of a reward that has virtually no chance of happening, you can, for example, stand at the McDonalds where you first met someone in a particular city with a bunch of blue orchids in your hand excited to be able see them one last time and still have them not show up. You can send someone a text telling them you don't want to cause them pain only for them to scream at you and tell you they never want to see or talk to you again. You don't get to rectify every mistake you made, but you get reminded about them in painstaking detail. You tell someone you have an innate need of protecting them from being hurt only to be questioned about how you felt. You can try taking a 'leap of faith' only to fall face first into the ground.

Okay, I've started to rant again. (You can't blame me! It's fucking 4 in the morning!). Also Notice the bottom left corner, THAT is how much I've gotten done on my report. :)

Pray for me.
ciao.

P.S. I know my handwriting isn't exactly an asset. :)

The Delhi Boy

This is going to be a long-ish post and it's going to contain a years worth of updates, so lets see if I can pull off the break neck story-to-story mode or has my near-year long hiatus turned me into some  chipmunk with a typewriter, thankfully though I still have doubts about the meaningful-ness of life so I might just be able to pull this off in readable length. 

Okay, Since my last post, I had yet another semester in college, which would have been a typical IIT sem again (you know, like the one's I dedicate a sentence to usually.) Only this time, there was a Dis-Co (I'm sorry for if you hate Chetan Bhagat, but I'll have to refer you to his first book to get to know what that means.) Also there was a brief stint (read: one night) in a district court, where I was taken to in the dead of the night by a few people (read: 8 police men) and when I say taken, I actually mean grabbed and tossed into one of those police buses that have grills on the window! (I'm so going to LOVE reading this blog a couple of years from now.) Well I'm NOT an 'Angry Young Man' per se, and I know the Amitabh Bachchan references don't exactly re-enforce faith but public forums don't permit me to get into the details. Anyway things did work out, and I did get away with just one 1:00 AM police thane waali call to dad.

Okay, so here I am, back in Bangalore, interning again, hoping that people here who might just employ me sometime in the future don't run into my blog, wondering how my stint with the corporate world has already started, and how the next couple of decades of my life might just follow this pattern. Life seemed to be leading somewhere so much cooler when I was the 5 year old Delhi Boy who thought that someday he would definitely go to space or meet God or at the very least end up with superpowers but here I am now, hoping to trade lives with someone from the Amazon where you run around with those big spears and once in a while just go up to the altar and sacrifice the kid who's born funny looking, coming to terms with how Aliens will never land on Earth and how God might just be an imaginary concept. Sigh. 

The thing is, that life's just become realistic now, and it's set to become more and more so. I miss being carefree and nonchalant about things, I miss the time where jobs were somethings that uncles did, where the future was shrouded in mystery. I know it might be a dumb thing to hold on to my expectations from 16 years ago, but I owe it to that 5 year old who didn't know or care what the petrol prices were or how he was going to make rent, who looked up at the sky at night, and thought that it was possible to touch it one day. I'll probably be cribbing about how carefree I was when I was 21 a couple of years from now, but that's life I guess, it's more about what could have been.  

Well yes, I'm not insane and nor am I a corporate droid yet, I did visit a shooting range and also went surfing (which was a fun memory till yesterday, when I found out that it's given me a cracked rib. Yes, I'm one of the few people who've had chest X-Rays now,) but it IS a letdown from my previous appraisal of the future. Hopefully next time I sit down and plan about the future it won't have so many things that contradict modern science. :)

 

Oh in other news, there was a break up in the meanwhile as well, it wasn't the best experience, I mean the word 'manipulative' was thrown around as if it were a Roadies Audition, I would have been more detailed about it, but the last time I posted about an ex here, google somehow started featuring that post as a top search result for "call girls in guwahati". Also what more do I need to say when the very omnipotent people at ask-oracle.com can summarize it for me, check this. Don't judge me for this, there are a LOT of people (my own mother included) who actually think that this stuff is true. :)

Later

Me

P.S. I had to credit her for the motivation behind posting, or she would have killed me.

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

Vindictive posting...

start/

1.


My little well is just a drop in front of the mighty sea that is life...

2. Heloozzzz ppl, u kno 2day v went to da movies, it was vry nyc fun guyzz, me nd ol ma frnds hd a grt tym, v hd iyc cream nd chips too. YUMMM!... and so on.

3. Life is meaningless.Life IS a bitch. Why do people you love the most always hurt you? After (insert time) of supposed love how could he/she rip open my chest, tear out my heart and smear it all over the walls around me! I could have done anything for him/her but he/she just didn't care.... and so on.

4. I'm just en route to the quest that encompasses life's innate and unending urge for serendipity and congruence. My purpose is to extricate a retort that's simplistic albeit not simple, as channeling the fortitude to climb the rock strewn road is just as imperative.... et cetera.

/stop

Okay, so THIS is a very personal post, we all keep coming across posts that are engrossing, quirky, cool and sometimes even life altering, well this one is about the ones that are none of those things. In fact, its about the posts that I hate.

1. Listen, you're basically trying to fool people into seeing things that aren't there, I mean, in a well done up post like this one, your readers would probably start commenting on how they practically orgasm-ed and attained nirvana all while looking at 4 near naked people in the middle of a river on a bamboo boat.

2. Too much of pain to read, this is NOT an sms, you're NOT paying per character, at least write complete words even if you don't care for punctuation.

3. Yes, I hear you, and I sympathize, so do ALL your friends, and ALL the people who've commented on your Facebook Status Messages and spent hours consoling you over the phone. But posting stuff about what a bitch life is, and how its doing you in the ass, will NOT help you, people don't know what to say to this man, so apart from the ' It'll get better soon's and the 'Take it in your stride, happens' there's not much you can expect.

4. There's a reason why archaic Shakespearean English is not used in day to day conversation, and that's because people find it LAME! It is NOT cool to write like you're Queen Elizabeth, and its not that people don't know what 'antidisestablishmentarianism' (firefox detects this as a typo, maybe I typed it wrong) means, they simply consider typing it to be too much of a pain in the ass.

Hope I've made my point clear.

Ohh and I think this is where I add the necessary disclaimers about how its just my perspective and how if you think that people have the right to write the way they want to, its okay and that the picture is not just 4 naked men in the middle of the river, but in fact it is the key to the secret of life....

Come on people, Life is just as complicated as you perceive it to be, and if the stuff I write is the amalgamation of exactly what all you hate in people's writing styles, then I'm sorry, but there's nothing you can do about it.

P.S. The 'start/' '/stop' probably come from the extensive coding I've been doing in mark-ups which also reminds me how much I hate insanely technical blogs that most fellow IITians have. Geeks are douches.

Me