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.