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

5 hours ago

We cut to the chase.
Due to the events of

http://carboncluster.blogspot.com/2008/05/danger-to-those-around-me.html
And
http://carboncluster.blogspot.com/2008/03/this-day-goes-real-long.html

My dad had somehow managed to convince himself that I wasn't really good with driving, (yeah you can't blame him), anyway due to the 'social outcry' against 19 year olds who 'can't' drive, daddy dearest deemed it fit to wake me up at 5:00 AM to 'test' my driving skills, he COULD have justified the time with some early-morning-fresh-air-crap, but well I'm guessing that telling me that it was 'in public interest' was somehow supposed to bring out the best in me.

Well, there's precious little that even a 'known public offender' like me can go wrong with in an empty ground at 5 AM, so after litmus test I was driving back home, when things got interesting...

DAD: Try taking a U-Turn on this road. (In this whole 'THIS is a surprise test!' tone)
Me: Wtf? Fine...
DAD: Turn the steering back now!
Me: Wait, let the car start to straighten...
DAD: TOO LATE! (Lunges for the steering, as if our lives are in grave danger as we turn on this empty street, FIRST GEAR!)
Me: DAD LEAVE! DAD LEAVE! DAD LEAVE! AARGGGHHHHH

Okay, there was this brief bit during which both me and my dad were hanging on either side of the steering, and it IS kind of difficult to control cars when a 50 year old man is trying to pull the steering down with his body weight on the other side! There was an open drain running on the street side, and as if this all conclusive driving test needed more of a silver lining, one of the tyres gets lodged in it!

Well what's amazing is how NO ONE listens to teenagers, because when I got back home, my mom tried to reason with me about how 'I should have been prepared for this'! As if its the mark of a good driver to handle things when people jump onto the steering wheel without warning! Its almost as if I was getting the 'गाड़ी चलाना कब सीखेगा? कलमुहे!'

Ohh and if things needed to get any better, my dad somehow managed to convince himself that my look of immense WTF-ness was in fact because I was embarrassed and saddened, he hence summed up the morning with a 'Don't be sad, a week like this with me, and you'll be good to go on roads'!

I miss the time when dad would just buy me things if he thought I was sad.

Totally looking forward to more 5 AM death rides.

Me.

Ye olde legend of yore.

And I blog again.

‘Once upon a time there was a boy, he was prety intelligent and nice only. He had many friends, he loved them very much. He was not fake and dishonest. His skin color was white, he studied in college, he loved it very much. He did not play very many sports but he liked sitting and watching his cosin sisters play in the sun. He liked colours- blue purpole and green. His favorite book in the world was Harry Potter. He read it every day. He tried to play the guitar in college but played one song only. He had a veryyyyy long nose, but he said he didn’t. Ok, I don’t know how to end.’

THIS is what happens when you dare your 8 year old cousin to write a fairytale. Ohh and I’m supposed to be the ‘intelligent and nice only boy’! I do like Harry Potter but she wrote that probably because let’s face it, isn’t that the only series kids have heard of and yeah, the one song only- Pull Me Under, Dream Theatre.

P.S. Typo’s are intentional and in accordance with the manuscript. And I do NOT have a long nose.

And yeah, that's the cutest thing I’ve ever read. :)

Me.

Taking it in. (eww)

I will henceforth blog daily often!

Not like that's a very enticing resolution, but hey, I do need some positive reinforcement from time to time. (For those of you who know, I picked this up in psychology, which we are coincidentally taught at the Indian Institute of Technology.)

You know this is the toughest bit to write in post, yeah, right after when you fill in some memorised and rehearsed snippet to start with and then reach the bit when you have no idea where to go to, believe me, I mean, I’ve actually been staring blankly at the cursor blinking at my face for the last 15 minutes... umm yeah, that’s enough of a peek into my near-comatose mind state. I really don’t want to scare away the select few, who actually bother reading this far into a post.

So basically my life’s hit an all time low, and I know that I write that at least once every post, but that's my life I guess, it keeps hitting them. Consistently. Here’s why

1. I got my laptop, and all I’m doing on it is spending 90 minutes writing a blog post that's going around in circles.

2. I am suffering from a ‘How I Met Your Mother’-hangover, which somehow adversely affects my facebook status messages. (Yeah I do blindly copy one-liners, even when people know where they‘re from...)

3. I have NOT messed up my academics! Well, not yet at least. (Okay, this one isn’t all that bad, just HAD to state this on my blog :))

4.

5. I just saw the cursor blink 20 times and pressed enter in the last one! Damn!

So there’s nothing important happening in my life right now. But surprisingly, even when I spend precious time driving home this seemingly trivial fact to you all, it makes me smile (yeah I do that too :)). Maybe life isn’t about living through the important things, it’s about going through these blank ones in between. (complete WTF-ness to kick ass philosophy in two sentences, nice.)

THE END.

ME

P.S: Hope you like the little inferences I’ve drawn in this post, cause, I’ve just found the mantra for the rest of my life (definitely, the next 15 minutes of it.)

(I will also cut down on bracket use.)

P.P.S: On a related yet different topic I’ve always wondered why women have such expressive eyes. I mean, isn’t that what we buy pets for? :)

Darkness decends on the banks of the Bhramaputra

"There will always be more manual robotics' events than you can ever conceive, and every single one of them will be coordinated by a senior, who has asked you to pull your pants down in the recent past." - The IIT G equivalent of Murphy's Law.

Ola.

Its not like the days in IIT are not like what they seem in the books (40 girls, 400 guys and what seems to be, 4000 goats.) but its at night that my alma mater truly comes into its own.

Okay, Imagine trying to break into your College Director's abandoned residence, at 1:00 am and running into the guard... Bad eh? Back here in Guwahati, THAT is the best case scenario, I mean, really, I would take being caught in flagrante delicto by a guard, to loosing a leg to a leopard any day.

And the seniors, well they make the leopard look like a tame kitten you can feed milk to. I remember reading the freshers' guide and drawing the conclusion that the seniors here were hard working, honest people who would treat the freshers like their siblings...bah! Imagine a person who loves you based on the amount of robots you are willing to build, take twenty of them, and add the fascination for doing a 'muski' to anything that moves. Brotherly isn't it?

To the leopard and the seniors if you also add the minor points like a dwindling academic career, and a near certain Chetan Bhagat CPI, you get a real good idea of how being awake at 3:00 am (and blogging about it) at IIT Guwahati feels.

So here I am 3:00 am and all, wondering why on Earth would soomeone with a friendly name like Robert T Morisson write 4000 pages of organic chemistry, and then proceed to sell them to innocent 18 year olds thus ruining their goat plagued lives even further. Chemistry quiz tomorrow. And I would have gladly taken to my date with destiny if it wasn't for the 8 dc motors (here's where the robotics comes in) lying on my desk, which i might have to solder (Don't, worry i don't know what that means either...) with something else (I soo know what I'm doing!).

Every 30 minutes or so, theres a knock on the door from one of those loveable seniors. Followed by a conversation that tends to go like this:

HIM: Hows the robot coming up?
ME: Prety sweet. I just haveto solder.
HIM: Hmm, what will you do now?
ME: I will... umm... solder!
HIM: What about the ketcher plug mechanism?
ME: Right after I solder!

See there you have it. End every sentence with the word 'solder' and you get a precious 30 minutes. Which you can dedicate to a newer alibi for next time!

So there's your bit off a place, where you can escape a guard at 1:00 am, and then be forced to celebrate your close shave by building a robot, 2 hours later, never for a second pausing to wonder about the chemistry quiz, and its impact on your future earnings potential.

Me?... I have 800 acres of it.

ciao.

P.S: I know I've spelt 'Brahmaputra', incorrectly in the title, at least now I do, Thanks to the know-it-all who pointed it out in her comment.