Blush.

There are times when I splurge, and there are times when I’m rather…. economical. I’m not ashamed of exhibiting the latter behaviour, and successfully ignore stares from rude waiters when I do not tip, or bookstore owners when they say “Thisees naat ye library”.

But occasionally, I do end up blushing. Like today.

Usual bookstore whose owner doesn’t quite mind me finishing the pulp-fic pop-lit in the store. Not when I actually do buy more durable tomes from him with amazing regularity.

I came across one of those tiny books which give you daily predictions for a whole year, based on your Sun sign. Found the right one. Found it was cellotaped shut.

Now I had no intention of buying that book, given one-third of the year is done. But I wanted to test the accuracy of the damn thing. Just like I read the day’s forecast after I am done for the day.

So since the cellotape was only around the middle of the book, I tried peering through the ends of the book, for one specific date to check if the book was on track there. Feb 10, Feb 14, Feb 15…. and I see the proprietor giving me a look.

I tried giving my best ‘Well, you caught me with my hand in the cookie jar for the gazillionth time since I was four years old, now what?’ look, but he just smiled and said

That’s not for Taurus, that’s for Aries

Whoops.

This is what happens when you’ve been going to the same bookstore since before you learned to read.

PS: I find in most stores that such books are present for all the sun signs with the exeption of Taurus… why? Is there more demand for these books among Taureans?

Thinking Retro

Yeah, so, I have this fascination/ addiction/ devotion nearing madness for anything Retro.

Music, The Beatles, The Eagles, Boney M, Bob Marley, Elvis, Johnny Cash, Stevie Wonder etc etc etc.

Movies, My Fair Lady, Star Wars, Grease, Rain Man, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Psycho, any Woody Allen(you get the drift)

Books, Id pick anything retro or even Victorian or even before that.  Given the choice between say, Anna Karenina and Dan Brown, I’d  go definitely for Anna Karenina.

I absolutely detest boy bands and chick lit/flicks.

The reason as my friend soaringheights, puts, is because of the experimental nature of the bygone era. I also say, “Hey! thats class, not crass!”.

But I wonder, when I hear my Dad humming Brown girl in the Ring or Id love you to want me, (yeah! he likes pop and I tend to exaggerate that ) that all these might have been pop in that age and indeed survived because it was popular.

May be a few decades hence, we might actually find people thinking Bryan Adams is absolutely hip, or accidentally discovering Himmesh Reshamiya and going gaga over it. Five  Point Someone might become a raging icon for anyone who wants to know what goes in an average IITian’ s life.

Who knows?

Exactly 365 days ago…

Tuna, Bond and the rest of the Chem bunch left for a trip.

Mal, Pub, me, Bond and Tuna simultaneously got teary-eyed.Saranya was stoic as usual.

And after the ‘byes to this bunch, Logik and I had a cuppa at F&H.

Then I got senti with Pragu.We went and had a final mess dinner.

Began burning movies. And Mahi and Devika were leaving then, began lapsing into flashback and all that.

Then Tata-’Byes to Maloo and Bigshow. And found Vada had disappeared.

I’m not sure if it was this night or what, but I remember spending  a drizzly night on the pavement expounding to Poonam the theory of the Life, Universe and everything else.

I distinctly remember the sentiness with Shruthi… speaking in half-sentences and choking on emotion.

Bugged Pubali for a while. And then went to extreme nostalgia with my roommate of four years. And some more teary-eyed-ness with Pubali. Some more last-minute movie-burning.

Then had last few chats on the NITK LAN. Played the last strains of Ella Fitzgerald my room would hear.Shut down my laptop one last time at hostel.

Found it was 4 am. Took a bath in the Old Block…. man, last day at NITK and it had to go without water in the blocks.

Came back and got supremely senti with Shruthi. Eyes full of tears, both of us.

Just as I was moving my stuff out, I exchanged the last few words of gossip I would exchange at NITK. And looked back at the room, the cupboard, under the bed, on the table, on the shelf one last time.

And then the farewell hugs. Each one made me more emotional than the others.

My mother had never seen me tearier. And that is saying something.

My last night-out at NITK. Feels like yesterday.

Voted!

A hard day’s night, spent in fitful slumber. The morning after, spent in some more fitful slumber. Woken up to shouts of “If you remain sleeping like this, how will you vote?”.

I seem to have come a long way from since I was a kid, when elections were a source of endless joy to kids.

My center was a bit of a distance from my house, and man! you wouldn’t know there was an election going on. No sign absolutely, except for traffic jams on the narrow approach roads to the school.

A few tables under a few trees had folks who gave you your serial number. You took that and went to the relevant voting booth. They checked your photo ID and inked your finger. You went behind a cardboard screen and pressed a button. You heard a beep. It’s all over.

Hardly any sign that an election was on, save this fat youngish man who jumped in front of you and said “Naane Krishna Byre Gowda, medam, nannige vote haaki. Candidate #2 medam”. And young men in orange shirts saying ‘Saar saar, BJP-ge vote, saar, Ananth Kumar-ge vote maadi, saar’.  And one ingenious guy who’d procured a model EVM panel from somewhere with Ananth Kumar’s name marked on it and showed you which button to press.Random kids running around with Congress flags. One of the ran upto my mother and said ‘Aunty, aunty, vote for Congress, aunty’. She said they had to be studying, not doing this sort of a job. They gave back a cheesy ‘aadre ivattu school illvalla aunty?’ That was about it.

And man, how many independents! The list of candidates was crazily long. I could have taught my two-year-old neighbor names of all the fruits and flowers just by showing her the EVM panel. No one seems to have cared about most of them… and hell, I didn’t even know Vatal Nagaraj was standing for elections till then!

A long long time back, when I was not old enough to vote, I used to live rather close to Vijaya Junior College, an election center. So you’d have folks coming to your door right from 7:30 am, exhorting you to vote. Not that anyone in our street needed it; every house had atleast one politically-aware member, in most cases, a grandfather, to drag the whole family off to vote even before the booth opened.

And that was a necessity…. someone else’d vote in your name if they could.

And the crowds! People thronged the place to vote. My uncle would check out the booth numbers well in advance just so that the rest of the family wasn’t caught in confusion and crowd when they went to vote. And maybe that’s why you hear stories only of families being separated at the Kumbh Mela and not at polling centers.

The path to the election center was lined with posters and buntings and whatnot. So many party symbols, so many colours. Bright orange ones for the BJP with Lord Ram posters, green-bordered ones with a wheel for JD, and… funnily, I don’t remember anything from the Congress campaign… maybe they thought they were beyond advertising, being so famous and all. You’d have partyLeader lookalikes, huge cutouts of politicians, and people shouting out slogans on microphones. And then you reached a desk which would mostly be manned by a volunteer you happened to know, and who wouldn’t wait until you told him your name to look it up and give you your booth number. And then you stood in queue with a gazillion others. When your turn came, they’d look at your ration card copy, make a mark against your name, a mark on your finger, and give you a ballot paper and point you to behind a cardboard screen. You stamped the paper and came out.

My grandfather took me to watch the fun, and the lady with the indelible ink very kindly obliged us by inking my finger as well. And I could show off in school the next day that I had ‘voted’

Talking of which… the indelible ink back then was some variant of ballpoint ink, and stayed where it was put for a week or two. Not like the ink now, which flows all over your hand and can be erased within minutes.

And enthu levels ohmigod…. all the old-timers on the street had taken it upon themselves to keep the poll fever on. They discussed, canvassed, volunteered, watched the news… and basically set the atmosphere. Even the oldest, senilest, illest folks turned up to vote, propped up by their sons or daughters-in-law. I remember this really ancient man on our street who went about telling the whole place to vote for BJP, vote for the lotus. And then comes out of the polling booth with a grin on his face, and when someone asked him who he voted for, he said with a twinkle in his eye, ‘Naanu chakrakke haakidini ‘ (I voted for the wheel (JD)).

Now my neighbors can hardly be bothered to get off their seats and trudge all the way to a center a kilometer away. There are no enthu old-timers either, to initiate conversation and discussion.

But most of all, I miss the entire election atmosphere. Even without the exit-poll gag, or saree and TV distribution, there should have been more of an atmosphere. I feel this is important, because it makes you feel like election is some sort of a ceremony, like bursting crackers on Diwali. Not some boring ‘fundamental duty’ you need to perform and get little in return, like paying taxes.

It should feel like it’s worth going back home after going half the way to the polling booth just to get your voter ID and come back, to vote. [For once, it wasn't me who forgot an all-important document before leaving the house.... it was my mother]. It shouldn’t bite that you are but one insignificant bit of a billion, and your vote is just a .000001% (figures not accurate) of the electorate.

And for that, nothing helps better than arrangements that look elaborate, and the infectious enthusiasm pervading the atmosphere for weeks before the polling date. It makes you feel like you’re doing something that matters, not like you’re wasting precious hours of work-free existence to take part in an activity from which you don’t get anything in the short run, a thankless job.

I don’t get why there’s a ban on offering voters TV sets and sarees. Or even cash. It’s all an incentive for people to come out and vote. Anyway it’s just one vote they can cast, great if they get something for it. Secret ballot is still guaranteed in this country for those who ask for it, so it’s quite a possibility voters take the saree/TV/cash and still vote for whoever they want…. atleast that’s what the flower-lady, the fruit-lady and all those folks I know who are lucky enough to get an incentive for voting do. I hate this mai-baap attitude of the government which presumes people are dumb enough to vote for anyone who gives them a saree.

My relatives in the US were talking about how during their presidential elections they don’t have any indelible ink, or extreme security measures, or loud campaigns which disturb their sleep…. the whole election process they said was so civilized, a far cry from the chaos in their homeland. [Aside: It brings to mind an image of folks walking into an election booth Apple-1984 style chanting "Obama, Obama".] Folks, don’t worry so much, we’re moving towards there.

Now if there was one aspect in which I’d beg people to not ape the West, I’d not talk about pub culture, or broken homes, or unhealthy food, or materialism, or capitalism or whatever crap… I’d just say leave our election fever be!

Bleg: I was wondering about ways to subvert the poll process, cast ultiple votes, capture booths and things like that. What are the chinks in the system? How do you sneak in votes in a number significant enough to make a difference? How much is possible without the compliance of the folks on election duty? How many folks on election duty actually subvert the process? What are the checks for the same? Someone kindly enlighten me.

Suggestions for Election Posters of Rahul Gandhi

So there exists an opportunity now to make election posters into collector’s items or posters to adorn a girl’s room. One of the candidates is a single half-Italian man. With dimples, at that. And no, Dino Morea is not standing for elections. Yet. (Which is actually a relief, given his recent departure from his Musu Musu Haasi-era good looks).

The scion of the dyNasty is who I’m talking about. No, I don’t say Mr. Gandhi is goodlooking. But he has all the right qualifications. Single? Check. Italian blood? Check. Dimples? Check. Fair complexion? Check. Under forty? Check (1970-born). So when I see this torturous poster every morning and evening exhorting me to vote for this man whose face doesn’t compare with that of John Abraham and Shayan Munshi in the neighboring hoardings, I cringe at all this potential going waste.

So… well… some pointers here to the folks who make posters for the Congress:

• Who are we trying to kid? Thirty-nine isn’t Young. Atleast not for first-time female voters in the 18-25 age group. So…. attempt to cast him in the Sanjay Dutt – SRK slot, not the Hrithik slot or John Ab slot. The struggling-to-be-fit-and-succeeding one.
• In a few years, he looks like he’s going to have more chins than the Hong Kong telephone directory. Dude…. or should I call you Uncle… work out, for godsake! SRK tops you with lines like “Yeah, Rahul Gandhi is goodlooking, but I have a six-pack’. And get Outlook or The Week or ToiLeT Paper or CNN-IBN or NDTV to chronicle your morning workout. And get cracking. The media goes gaga about Modi’s (if only figurative) chhappan ki chhatti….this is your chance to score one over him by proving that he is just all talk while you have the real stuff… and by extrapolation this is true for other issues like development, as ToI will write.
• Get a better photographer. Not your current one, or these presswallahs whose cameras add ten pounds to your face. Stretch your neck a bit when they take a picture of your face. That way you avoid the extra chins being added. Maybe you can strike the thinking-man pose – looking skyward in contemplation.
• And smile. Or grin. Widely. That’s what Italian men are expected to do. You don’t have it in you to look like a sleek mafia don – you need a darker skin tone and sharper features to carry that off. So take the pretty-boy route out.
• And sign off with Hasta la Vista, baby. Yeah, it’s Spanish, but who really knows the difference between Spain and Italy? People take Romance languages rather literally.
• An accented English/Hindi is okay. For the same reason as above.

I certainly don’t want the Congress to win this election, however narrowly. My loyalties are well-displayed on the widgets on the right here. But heck, if we are having posters that are going to be plastered everywhere from Malleshwaram to Basavanagudi, from Indiranagar to Rajajinagar, we might as well have posters good enough to be called eye-candy.

And… I guess the best thing for Mr. Gandhi to do would be to adapt a line from Jhankaar Beats to be his guiding light – Jeete toh jeete, haare toh haare, har dil ko apna banaana hai. My tips might or might not help with the former, but the latter, quite surely it will.

Rahul Gandhi’s Girlfriend

If you landed here searching for ‘Rahul Gandhi’s Girlfriend’ or variations of the same, please pause a few moments to answer the following questions for me in the comments section below. Please. Pretty Please.

1. Is this your first time searching for Rahul Gandhi’s girlfriend?
2. Are you male or female?
3. What motivates you to search for Rahul Gandhi’s girlfriend?

Coz over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed my blog gets a scary number of hits for ‘Rahul Gandhi Girlfriend’ and the like, and I’d like to know the method behind this madness. It’s nice that people are election-aware and all that in this election season, but why are there so many searching for Rahul Gandhi’s Girlfriend and ending up on this blog? It’s not even in the first page of results! (Of course… after this post, it will be).

And if you really want info on Rahul Gandhi’s girlfriend, it might help to check this post out.

And… I really wonder why a goodlooking guy with Italian genes and desirous dimples (just an expression… I personally think he looks like an overgrown schoolboy) is yet unmarried… something sinister, the bitchy old maid in me says.

Movies I watched of late

I’ve recently had a bit of respite from a month’s hell, and my sister, from a year’s… and we’ve been catching up on movies we’ve missed.Here are the highlights:

8X10 Tasveer
You wonder if Nagesh Kukunoor had a lobotomy or his brain tissue was replaced with that of Abbas-Mastan… is this the same guy who directed Rockford and Hyderabad Blues? And if you haven’t watched it yet, I’ll spoil it for you: The villain is Akshay Kumar’s evil twin. And Ayesha Takia is his girlfriend, while pretending to be the girlfriend of the Hero Akshay Kumar. What hits rock bottom however, is when the evil Akki says to the good Akki after it is revealed that Ayesha Takia is the evil one’s girl too, “We have the same taste… isn’t that kinky?’.  *Gag*.

My colleague wondered why no one in the movie thought of showing Akshay Kumar a picture of the night sky or some other bit of the universe, given he can go back in time and space to identify the events before and after the image was clicked.

Gula..
I couldn’t finish watching Gulaal. But whatever I saw of it… awesome. Kay Kay Menon is enchantingly fiery and calculative. Mahi Gill suits her role perfectly. They couldn’t have picked a better guy for the role of a nerdy fresher than Raj Singh Chaudhary. I’ll finish watching it one of these days.

Vantage Point
Fast-paced. Nice storytelling style. I’d like that applied to other sorts of stories… just to see how it’d work.

In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones
The one I liked best. It’s a really nice slice-of-life movie about students at the School of Planning and Architecture. You see so many movies depicting hostel life, youth, students and stuff like that…. but none have come so close to reality as this one has. In most such movies, you’ll have the hero riding a bike and having a hot girlfriend, but here he’s stocky, unattractive, takes a rick, doesn’t even get the maximum screen space, and has a cabaret dancer for a fiancee. The villain is supposed to be the head of the department…. in any other movie, he’d've been an intimidating guy suited and booted all through, and who doesn’t do an ounce of good work…. but here, he’s played by the diminutive Roshan Seth, dresses just as unimpressively as the profs at NITK, lives under his mother’s thumb, and can be seen at the drawing board even at late hours… but is mighty condescending and sarcastic and his tongue-lashings that begin with a “My dear donkey” rather remind you of some of the more condi profs you’ve met. Just when you wonder how such a guy can be evil, you get to know he’s holding a grudge against a student and has flunked him for four years just because on a dare he peed next to him in the bogs and looked over the side… and you see him whispering to the other thesis jury members that this student is a hardcore drug addict….. evil, evil Prof.

Quite a star-cast… Himani Shivpuri is the cabaret-dancing fiancee. Shah Rukh Khan (yes, the very same) is a random student with a few lines of dialogue who is credited as one of the ‘Other Others’. Arundhati Roy (yes, the very same) is one of the main characters, apart from doing the story and screenplay.

It amazes me how little she has changed over the course of twenty years (more so since the same twenty years have changed me beyond recognition). She sounds the same. Speaks the same commie crap. Gets credited for absolute nonsense – in the movie, her character gets away with complete crap presented for the Art Thesis and even manages to secure the highest marks in the class…. not much has changed.

But what shocks me is her looks. She has the same ungainly way of walking still. Wears a saree the same way, with a short pallu. Wears her hair the same unkempt way. And her build hasn’t changed at all! She’s still the same anorexic-looking stick-thin woman. If it weren’t for her wrinkles, I’d suggest she’s some sort of a non-learning robot in which the things to speak, walk, dress, write have been hardcoded long ago….. maybe we can call her Paranoid Android.

Yet another new beginning

There’s always something we want to change about ourselves or our lifestyles. But it’s not just any day when you decide to make a huge list of changes.

And that’s where I’m rather glad I live in India.

New Years are always the time for a fresh set of resolutions and for return of determination to try follow a set of rigid rules.

I celebrate three New Years at last count now – the Gregorian, the Lunar New Year on Ugadi and the Solar New Year on Vishu/Varsha Pirappu. That should ideally boost my resolve and all that…. but, well…..

You can see the state of my resolve to follow resolutions on my photoblog which hasn’t been updated in months now [I had resolved to upload one pic a day]. But it’s not entirely my fault… I’ve been caught up in so hectic a schedule that I leave home in a hurry and come back well after the streets are empty and devoid of subjects friendly enough to be photographed and when lighting conditions are at their most pathetic. And the time in-between is spent in a camera-free zone, don’t ask me more on that. Maybe I should use weekends, but gah! I had to follow the same schedule on weekends too!

Seriously, what do I do? I don’t feel good about shelving such a good initiative.

Maybe I should also begin to celebrate Gujarati New Year that occurs during Diwali? (Though I’d never celebrate New Year on Pongal day and play right into the hands of that cunning dictator Karunanidhi).

Here’s wishing everyone a very happy Varsha Pirappu: இனிய தமிழ் புத்தாண்டு நல்வாழ்த்துக்கள் (pardon my spelling, if it’s wrong…. I used Google Transliterate, and I have no clue about how to spell things correctly in தமிழ).

PS: In less than a month, this blog turns four, and this author twenty-two…. more occasions for resolutions?

Bollywood Hero Stereotypes

To start off with, I hardly watch any hindi movies, save a few here and there. Hence maybe my ensemble is not large enough for the generalization.

So, Why is it that all heros know every damn skill under the sun. They can kick any badguys’ ass (irrespective of the badguy’s muscle strength, or the hero’s lack of training) , left right and centre, and end up without a scratch. How is it that, no one ever can pull a joke on him except may be the heroine. Even if they do, why is it that he can still or has to get back them right away and make them look foolish. How is it that he can sing awesome, whether on a moving train or maybe even as he is sitting on the wall of a really tall bridge. And at times even play an instrument or two, with out any prior practice? How is it that he always appears as the lead dancer in every group dance? How come he has the guts to go up the stage, when he is in the audience every single time. May be he could have stage fright. How does he get to wear meticulously ironed, and carefully chosen wardrobe (branded at times), in every single scene? How come ive never seen a hero riding, may be a Bajaj Chetak?

May be the crowd likes the God figure that they can admire, hence the movie makers cash on it. May be, its the eternal struggle to do or learn everything under the sun like some people,  they draw inspiration from this. (What?).  May be us, the crowd, we like to see whom we are supposed to empathise with always having the upper hand.

The “so, they lived happily ever after”, or ” Yeah! so what? in the end he came off with, erm… flying colors!”, ” May be in the end he died, but still look what he did! He saved lives in the universe around him and everything in general”. Afterall why would we want to pay that extra buck in the multiplexes along with the popcorn and the coke, if we had to come home depressed?

Why is it that ideal characters are preferred? No.  Why do we like Happy Endings?

Shopping, my foot

Thanks to a dog running off with my favorite pair of shoes, and my sister’s, and my cousin’s, we found ourselves shopping for shoes. Recipe for instant hell.

I have exceptionally tiny feet. My cousin has exceptionally large feet. And my sister is extremely choosy.

Three long whiny hours. Walking around hunting for more and more footwear stores. Exhausting all the shop assistants. Feeling thrice the frustration we would if we were doing this alone. If it’s not the colour, it’s the comfort. And when both are fine, you never, ever, ever find it in your size, goddammit. I swear, if I hear the phrase “Sorry madam, we don’t manufacture in this size” one more time, I’ll say “I protest!”, and hurl a shoe. Or maybe I won’t…. coz shoes my size are rare as a Rafflesia (ooh, new simile which is even an alliteration!). When the last of us found a pair for which we screamed out “Oh, it fits! It fits!”, we were ten times happier than the Prince when he found Cinderella’s foot fit the glass slipper and yelled out the same words.

Oh, bloody hell, if Cinderella had as tiny and beautiful feet as the stories say, the only way she’d be able to get nice shoes was if she had a Fairy Godmother.

Talking of which, I wish I had a fairy godmother who’d give me shoes that fit.

And…. I still seem to like dogs better than cats. Surprising, given that I’ve been bitten by one, been chased by a family of six dogs, had one run off with my shoes, almost been attacked by one while attempting to photograph it… and had one stink my room up when it ran in to take shelter from the firecracker-rich Diwali atmosphere outside…. who knows, maybe I’ll be more popular than Cinderella sometime later.

DONT PANIC!! :P

Tell me.

In Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the characters keep traveling back and forth in time, i.e. keep changing their (x,y,z,t). Or, the author keeps juggling them through and in between space-time co-ordinates. Notice that at no point they forget what has happened to them before? Irrespective of who the character is, or when they met each other or even how many times they have gone through the rollercoaster ride!

This would imply that “Recollection” can be considered as another co-ordinate? Say ‘r’.

Then the book is written in (x,y,z,t,r) co-ordinates and moves in the positive direction of ‘r’.

What say?

It’s a mad, mad, mad world

The past twenty-four hours seem to have been filled with absurdity upon absurdity.

Right in the morning, I find a dog ran away with my shoe. I spent the rest of the morning hunting the gutters and empty sites to see if the dog had hidden it there. No luck.

So I picked a pair of my sister’s which looked rather new. After walking for ten minutes, I realized why they were so new… they BITE!

Earlier in the morning, I discovered that making kosambari is pretty demanding – a cucumbersome task.

And then I find this colleague swiping his access card, pulling the door, swiping his card, lather rinse repeat.. to no avail. The door wasn’t opening. I wanted to step out, and so I walked up to the door. I smiled at him and pointed to the sign on the door in big friendly letters that said “Push’.

“Oh, sorry”, he told me. “Why are you saying sorry to me?”, I asked. “Whoops, sorry”, he said to me. And then absent-mindedly turned to the door and said sorry to it.

And then there was this guy who got a call, which he answered saying “Please call me later… battery’s low”. The person on the other end couldn’t hear what he said, and called him back again and again to find out what is that he was hollering. Until, of course, the battery died.

I saw this magnificent hound dog and thought it’d photograph well. It’s another matter there was insufficient light and the dog wasn’t cooperating and would possibly have bitten me if the owner hadn’t pulled it back in time. The moment I put the cellphone camera away, the dog calmed down and even offered a paw. “What’s your name?”, I asked the dog, while petting it (FWIW it sounded more like “wosshyurnayme, deah?”). The owner replied, “Gopalakrishna Rao”.

Oh, and someone from the Tamizh heartland told me I speak Tamil like a *shudder* North Indian. I should have killed her, or maybe, like the venerable Mr. Arjun Sharma suggested, I should have said ‘Yaazhpaanam’. But then, given my northie Tamil (pronounced टमील), both would mean the same.

And to end the day, I come across this doctor’s clinic which is named “An Apple A Day”. Draw your own conclusions.

EttaNother obscurish post

The reason this post is obscurish is because it deals with information which can’t for the hell of it be in public domain. Atleast not just yet.

The frustration levels are at an alltime high. And I’ve been crabby and complaining for quite some time now, as people who know me personally will attest. I don’t know how much longer I’ll have to keep sustaining myself with ‘This too shall pass”. I mean, I know it will.. but until then…

Then there’s the flow and ebb of hope every now and then. Highs and lows are to be expected, but heck, I can’t keep up with such wild swings of emotions all the time.

And then there’s the realization that I go through everything in life in expectation of something else, never really feeling I belong anywhere, or that I’m on the right track. Uncertainty and worry are my inseperable companions. It’s all the more worse that I’m by nature a happy-go-lucky person… I don’t like the uncertainty and worry, and would just like to sit back and enjoy life. Quite unlike others who get worried if they realize they have nothing to worry about, and who can never enjoy any experience in life, and always exude negativity. I’m not like that, not one bit.

There’s also the overanalysis and paranoia that cannot for once accept that it might be incompetence, and not conspiracy that’s behind every incident around me. Maybe it is conspiracy, but I’d live better if I didn’t assume that every single time anything happened…. the extra-large helpings of analysis do not aid in decision-making, and breed mostly irrational fears of failure.

When things get within reach, I don’t seem to reach out and bring them closer… I just seem to push them away, out of my reach….and then I rue about the ones that got away. Capital.

I just want a break, when I can get back to being organized and happy.

Funny…. I always seem to get mightily pissed this time of the year, every year…. maybe it’s to do with being in school for fourteen years of my life, when I’d be given a much-awaited break at this time of the year… this is when it all becomes too much to take and you just want a small break away from it all…. nah, doesn’t happen in the real world, apparently.

However… life’s not all getting pissed and venting frusts for me… there are also a lot of pleasant things happening, but sadly they fall into two categories: Classified Information and Stuff That Has No Place On This Blog, and hence you reading this wouldn’t get to hear about them here.

I’ll sign off with some of the best PJs I’ve cracked/heard in the past few weeks.

• James Bond slept through an earthquake. He was shaken, but not stirred.
• Q. What do you call it when there are two instances of MatLab running?
  A. A pun
• Paro D: Dev D’s parody.

And then there were some that weren’t quite…

• I cracked one about Nero burning ROM… but damn, it turned out that the software was named Nero just because it burnt CD-ROMs. Damn.
• And I said something about poetry and going from bad to verse… but hell, it turned out that Bangalore Times put the same thing on their TShirt quotes section the same damn day. Now that is embarassing – to make the same puns as BgT, after they crack it! *Sigh* I guess going seven days without a pun makes one weak.