Punctuality and Women

As you enter the one of the BSNL  offices in Mysore… Well, after you have entered the room directly in you line of vision, a huge board greets you… On that board are these words boldly written, “Being punctual is being polite. When you are not punctual you are wasting other people’s time.”

It is around ten thirty in the morning and this is the only room empty ( and with the board). After some time people who work there turn up… You cant help but notice that ALL of them are women

Meri Marzi

Just read an article in today’s newspaper. The wedding of two fire-brigade officers through a video conference. The groom stayed in China’s quake hit southwest part, helping survivors.

Reminds me of this line from Devang Patel’s absolutely hilarious song ,  “Mein Apni Shaadi mein na Jaoo, Meri Marzi”… <Laughing out Loud>

And Oh yeah!! he used a mineral water bottle for toasting!!!

Three.

Another year of blogging begins. Three years down. Whew! I’ve never managed to sustain any interest of mine this long until now!

Tuna and I had absolutely NO idea on May 10 2005 that this would carry on so long. The sheer convenience of using WP, the features offered, the ease of posting… I guess these are responsible.

My life isn’t as power-packed as Amitabh Bachchan’s or Nandita Das’s or even Darsheel Safary, that I can blog about something I’m doing that half the world is looking forward to, or a chance meeting with Larry Page, or lunch at Aamir’s, or inaugurating the new ride at Wonder-La. So for three years, the odd person (mis)directed by Google to this page when they were searching for ‘Gujarati swearwords’ or information on the odd Bangalorean P3P who I might have fleetingly mentioned as an arbit made-up name, or info on NITK something or AIEEE something else would end up reading on glorious mess food, or the obscure movies, books and songs I’ve watched/read/heard once upon a time and can’t stop raving about, or some total non-incident in my life, or.. well.. Inci and Engi.

Strangely, I’m at a loss for words when it comes to describing what this blog has meant to me. Occasionally a time-capsule, most of the time just a space I use to express myself, my views, my prejudices… oh, I don’t know… it feels like that old cliche - anything you say about this blog, you’ll find some instance in which the opposite is true. Or maybe it’s just an excuse for my woefully limited vocabulary in describing this place.

I once tried entering this page for the Indibloggies or some such blog contest. And hell, it didn’t fit into any ‘category’. It isn’t exactly a personal blog that talks about what my pet lizard had for breakfast, or a political one, or one dedicated to fiction, or a humour blog. Some might say I need to feel proud of ‘unbelonging’. I’ll say Indibloggies has its definitions too narrow. [Or... am I wrong and does this fit into the mold of a 'personal' blog?]

It’s been a new experience with bouquets as well as brickbats coming our way. It’s an exhilarating experience watching people searching for my college and ending up here… it soon turns nerve-wracking, coz the profile of the average person googling for NITK, or simply ending up here, remains unknown to us… it could be anyone ranging from my upstairs akka to my maami in Mambalam.. or some casual acquaintance or (as it is mostly) someone who has no idea who we are, and knows us only by what we write and forms her opinion of us accordingly…

The last point was one I discussed with Srav a while back… she said she found the online personalities of people quite different from what they were offline… while I argued that the same basic traits shine through an interaction, be it online or offline…. just the difference in the media changes what we see and how much we see of their personalities. That said, I’ve found that you can’t arrive at a generalization on whether to judge people by their online personalities or not, or for that matter generalize anything about the blogging world… it is stupid to consider blogosphere as a single, homogeneous entity. It is as diverse as the world it spawns from.

I’ve seen a wide variety of blogs, some good, most bad (people who can’t as much as spell are blogging) in the past three-four years (I didn’t much care about or trust user-generated content before that). The bad blogs include popular ones, too, and reading them occasionally has me going “Aiyyooo!” each time. As if that were not enough, their comments sections are rife with “Oh, wow, what a great post, as usual” sort of comments which make me wonder what the world is coming to. But a year or so into this, and you’ll know which ones to avoid. And that leaves us with the godlevel posts and godawesome bloggers. And, the ones that don’t dazzle you with brilliance, but just, say, put a smile on your face, or get you thinking on a new track, or inform you of some nifty trick you find realy useful…

And another thing I had to learn was that everything here is mostly an opinion, one way of looking at things, and by no means the absolute truth; something to be taken with a pinch of salt. The amount of information can be mindblowingly colossal, and you simply need to have filtering mechanisms in your head so that you don’t accept everything you read without giving it a good amount of thought. And if that is too taxing, you need to have thumb-rules to reject bits and pieces. Not every well-written piece is full of sense, and not every ill-worded piece is completely nonsense.

In the past few months, though the number of hits as well as the number of subscribers of this blog have increased, the average number of comments garnered has gone down. Guess this can be put down to Google Reader rising to prominence. Wouldn’t it be great if a commenting feature too was integrated with Reader?

Guess it can also be put down to the increase in the frequency of blogging. It’s been more than one post a week at times… shows what joblessness can do.

All in all, I’ve had a brilliant time on blogosphere, be it writing or reading. The sort of community that builds over a period of time, the regular visitors, arbit people stumbling onto your page, help slipping in seemingly from nowhere over some problem you’d've mentioned fleetingly in one of your posts, sharing of knowledge/information - jokes, tips, tricks, stories, feelings… and collaborative work! … all these have never been easier. It’s a wonderful world out here.

And it’s been intertwined with our college life a good bit - and here, I’m not just talking about the blog’s title - … enriched it immensely. I’m quite sure my four years would have been different if it weren’t for me scribbling here. Hmm… so since we’re out of NITK as of now, do we shut this place down? Call it a different name?

We choose not to; the inertia weighs heavily on us.

And… what next? Who knows? Playing it by ear seems the only thing to do. That said, I don’t see quitting blogging anytime in the near future; it’s become too much of an acquired taste, like sturgeon caviar.

I guess that’s rich enough. That’s sufficient for years to come, I hope.

Dreams

Many a time, you see something that catches your fancy. Then you see something else that overrides all the previous ones.

Many a time, you see something that you’d like, but you’re not sure whether it’d fit in with your life.

Many a time, you find something you think you really want. Many a time, that turns out to be yet another passing infeasible fancy.

Sometimes you find something that’s a culmination of all your passing fancies, fears, dreams and aspirations, that your entire existence desires it, and is prepared to go all out to get it.

And occasionally, you find something that tops that.

You’re prepared to do your best for it. You don’t quite know your chances. That helps, in keeping every possibility open, and every hope alive, and every anticipation waiting in the wings.

Till something happens, you close your eyes and dream.

A Name Suggestion

Think I’ve mentioned a good number of times both on this blog and elsewhere about the lack of a rightwing media house in India, due to which people don’t get multiple perspectives to choose from.

If there was one, I think it should be called “Yeah, Right!”.  

But maybe that would be too in-your-face, so maybe the media house as such can be called by a milder name, with one aspect of it called Yeah, Right!. Not the TV channel or the radio station… there are enormous problems in everyday pronunciation, and the cynical tone can’t be replicated each time someone mentions the name. A magazine would be perfect, but the title would be too informal for it to be taken seriously… maybe the magazine targeting the youth?

Or maybe the official blog.

If you want to cash in on this idea, contact me here… this blog is protected by a Creative Commons license.

End of post… pretty irrelevant, I guess… do read the longer and more passionate post on student activism I wrote.  Check out the comments section of the post, too…. it’s bringing out some passion I see.

Socially, Politically, Technically irrelevant post

This doesn’t make an iota of difference to anyone or anything in the world. I’m normally the nicest of folks, but there seems to be no incentive to be so. I’m not pure evil either. But my attempts to be so would definitely be vindicated.

Stop saying “Yea sista, I so know what you are talking about”. Coz you don’t, you sneaky, two-faced, manipulative <insert choice swearword casting aspersions on character of the person>.

Quit wondering what this is all about. Scroll down and read about the grand idea of googlebombing Andrew Symonds, or if you’d prefer, how much I hate Taare Zameen Par and Aamir Khan.

PS: One thing that’s been keeping me going is “Everything Happens For a Reason”. Someday, I hope to come back to this post and updating it with an “It Does!”.

Placement Preparation

Here are a few questions I picked from the placement prep book, I borrowed from my roomie…

1) Atmosphere always has

a) Oxygen

b) Air

c) Germs

d) Moisture

e) Dust

Ans: Insufficient data. Which extraterrestrial body are you talking about?

2 ) A clock always has

a) Battery (It could be a hand wound clock)

b) Numbers (My mum’s has dots instead of numbers and same is the case with mine)

c) Alarm (You can’t be sure)

d) Needle (It could be a digital one)

e) Frame (How do you know? It could be the clock at the bottom corner of my computer screen)

3 ) An oasis always has…

a) Travelers

b) Water

c) Sand

d) Camels

e) Forests

Ans: Water, unless it’s a mirage.

4) A school always has…

a) Principal

b) Building

c) Library

d) Teacher

e) Classes

Hey!! Where did you leave the students?

5) A mirror always…

a) Reflects

b) Retracts

c) Distorts

d) Refracts

e) Reveals the truth (LOL!!)

6) Logic Question:

Statements:

1. Some dogs are goats

2. Some goats are cows

Conclusion:

This is either not in this century or this person was in McGonnagal’s Transfiguration class.

My conclusion about this book: It needs a thorough revision for the next edition…

A booklist.

In one of his columns titled “Growing Up With Books In India”, Shashi Tharoor talks about his voracious reading habits. He mentions that one year he kept a journal of all the books he read [comics didn't count] to see if he could reach 365 before the calendar did. And sure enough, he reached the mark before Christmas.

I tried the same this year, and found I reach nowhere near the Great Indian’s impressive total. Firstly, I didn’t strictly maintain a journal; I just compiled one whenever I felt jobless [which wasn't very often in sem 5; the first time at NITK I felt like we had work we could do]. However it turns out to be quite an okay number, thanks to my jobless period in the summer vacations. However, not all of them are worth listing here, so here are some of the better books I read:

• Loads of Asimov - Entire Foundation series, the whole Elijah Baley bunch, I, Robot and his complete short stories - Essentially the entire Robot series. Also read Nightfall, which IMHO is his best work, after A Fantastic Voyage which is a biological thriller.
• Silence of the Lambs - Was a disappointment. I’d expected it to be a bit more wild, the movie had raised my expectations.
• Orwell’s Animal Farm. Good one, I’ll say.
• Orwell’s 1984. Easily the scariest novel I’ve read.
• The Motorcycle Diaries. I think I should get the sequel, too. I came across a version written by Alberto Granado… it wasn’t half as good.
• A bit of Wodehouse - Psmith, and Jeeves.
• A lot of Perry Mason, so much that I’m sick of it now.
• And I also started on Agatha Christie. Never liked her mysteries before, now I think they’re okay.
• The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger. Yeah, the book that was banned on account of it having a “negative influence” on its readers after it was found in the possession of John Lennon’s assassin, who was said to be obsessed with the lead character. Awesome read. Makes you never want to grow up.
• A House for Mr. Biswas by Sir VS Naipaul. And lo, I’m a Vidiaphile! After a long, long time, I’m reading a book where the writer focuses more on the story than on how he tells it. I read somewhere that if, while reading a piece, you stop and say, “Wow, this guy writes well!”, the writer sucks. That doesn’t happen with this book; you’re so riveted to the fate of Mr. Biswas [referred to thus throughout the book, even when his toddlerhood was being described] to worry about anything else. And you know the end before it happens, but all the same, you can’t help but feel elated when you read that he’s finally got a house to call his own, and that he didn’t let his widow suffer the same fate as her sisters; she didn’t have to depend on her mother’s fast-fragmenting house for anything.
• The Great Indian Novel, by Shashi Tharoor. It lives up to its name. Easily the best Indian English novel I’ve come across. Most others are written with the writers oh-so-conscious about the fact that they’re Indian.
• Jug Suraiya’s Where On Earth am I?. It’s a great travelogue, the writing style is quite OK, ranging from descriptive to satirical, like his Sunday column in the Trash of India [ToI]. Which isn’t surprising, considering that some of the shorter pieces have appeared in his column Jugular Vein.
• Satanic Verses. And got introduced to one of the most endearing characters in fiction ever - Gibreel Farishta. The novel isn’t all that great, and other than the fatwa, there isn’t too much shock value about it. Not as good as Midnight’s Children, or The Moor’s Last Sigh.
• Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. Pseudo SciFi. Avoid it unless you really really want to read something that has PRETEND written all over it.
• And, oh yes, The Fountainhead. I really wanted to see what the fuss was all about. Some woman who can’t write dialogue to save her life spun a 500-page yarn filled with walking-metaphor characters just to say she wants to do her own thing.
• Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. Dunno why, but I feel it’s only for people who don’t, or can’t make their own philosophy.
• Ice-Candy Man by Bapsi Sidhwa. Sad one. Don’t bother.
• And oh, yes, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by AlexanderMcCall Smith. It’s a useless bit of pop-lit, not the sort you adorn your bookshelf with; finish reading it in the store itself. I’ve particularly grown to despise the author, and this lack of regard I have for him only increased when I saw that he had written the preface for an illustrated version of RK Narayan’s autobiography, My Days [With excellent illustrations by RK Laxman - It does really bring alive the reckless schoolboy in Madras with his monkey and peacock, his headmaster father... it's worth a buy]. All he does is summarize the contents of the book in boring prose with absolutely no personal touch, as a preface to an autobiography should be.

And some I hope to finish some day:

• Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
• Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
• Mein Kampf
• Hemingway’s For Whom The Bells Toll
• Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea. Bit surprising I haven’t, yet.
• Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. Liked the movie.
• Salman Rushdie’s Grimus, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
• …….just want to exhaust the neighborhood bookstore: it might not be as large as Landmark@Forum or Crossword on Residency Road, but it certainly has a large collection of books, and a lot more variety than the two-floored Crossword offers: A lot less self-help, a lot less pulp fiction and chicklit, really few coffee-table books, a lot more fiction, a lot more volumes worth stocking your bookshelf with… the sort that’ll keep you company on a rainy day when there’s no electricity…

There’s a lot more to look forward to in 2007… hopefully HP7 will release - JK has revealed that the book’s going to be called Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It hopefully won’t disappoint, and the finale will be something that’ll be enough to keep us engaged for a while after the book’s hype has died down. And us Numbskulls are Pottermaniacs, so I guess we’ll work ourselves to a PotterFrenzy and come up with a long, long list of speculations like this one, and possibly a review like this one.

Hopefully, we’ll widen the spectrum of our literature. I’ve never found nonfiction enthralling, save travelogues, collections of letters and a few columns. In the coming year, I hope to come across well-written specimens of the above, too.

Most people probably curse the end-sem exams for taking the fun out of their lives, and cite them as the prime reason for the loss of their reading habit. I used to be among them too, as I found that that was the time when you’d want to do anything but cram, but can’t. Over the past two-and-a-half years, I’ve learnt to let fiction coexist with textbooks over the period of endsems. For that is the time when you’re most aware of what you’d like to read, what you’d like to write,which book is best suited for which mood, what JK Rowling should do to Harry and his friends after Book7…… not quite thoughts you’d want to fly away from your head, right? To top it all, you’d feel like going through the first fifteen pages of that very unreadable The Hunchback of Notre Dame just for the vivid description that suddenly seems so soothing to the senses - certainly not a mood you’d like to let slip away.

And, apart from all of that very enjoyable reading, we have a killer semester coming up. Which might mean huge volumes to be pored over and notes made from. And yeah, there are three-and-four-lettered competitive exams coming up, too, which means there are more pages for our noses to be between. It’ll be the same as reading good fiction - you don’t really believe what’s said to be happening, you’ll learn new words, new facts, and read the same thing over and over again, and on each subsequent reading, come across something you hadn’t noticed before.

Here’s a prayer to Goddess Saraswati, the goddess of Learning and all things literary asking her to bless us that we might be successful in all our endeavours this year, starting with acads [including job interviews and competitive exams], and all the other sidetracks we’ll have [like this blog], and also bless us further, so as to never let the reading habit wane or die, and may we help proliferate it, and also thanking her not only for letting us read, but also for the fact that others read us today.

Happy 2007.

There was a green ball and there were a pair of green eyes…

It was one of those serious discussions with my mum
on my own shortcomings. She showed me a photo.
“Look at those eyes, thats how you should be…”

Early morning. The Hindu, Sports section. Results of
some tennis match.

There was a green ball. And a pair of green eyes fixed
on it. A raquet poised to strike.

The audience was blurred. The ground was blurred.
Her chic clothes were blurred.

Sharapova’s eyes, I’ll never forget them…

Last few words before we phoenix

It’s a fact that we haven’t been at our blogging best this semester. Yeah, I did write the erratic post here and there, but it was all updates-on-what’s-going-on-with-me kind of stuff. Uninteresting. Worse, it’s been eternity since Tuhina last thought of a blog post.

Blame it on V sem B.Tech. We’ve been so caught up with labs and assignments and tests and miniprojects that we haven’t had time to reflect on anything deep enough to write about.  More so Tuna, who, by virtue of being in ChemEngg [PsychoBranch III at NITK, after ECE and EEE, not necessarily in that order; surprisingly, diploma branch IT comes a close fourth] can’t turn her creative juices to writing, not after so much of Nocardia [note the capital N] and Spirulina.  However, me, by virtue of my branch can always find excuse to be online, and hence dished out a bit of scribbling here and there.

It’s been a long time since I checked out a new blogger on the block, longer still since I commented on the blog of someone I don’t know.

But anyways, all that is about to change. I’m on a Sabbath away from the Net for a couple of weeks, thanks to a sudden alarm bell in the heads of my teachers saying “Continuous Evaluation Overdue!”, and then, a week later, I’ll be hitting the panic button marked “EndSems”.

Nah, it isn’t an increased level of seriousness or anything, it’s just that the monitor tires my eyes, and increases the duration of my staying awake, which I can’t afford to let happen, thanks to an overdose of Blackadder straight from YouTube which has left my aching head in a spin.

Anyway, the next two weeks are going to be hell if all goes well, and then we’ll be back posting on stuff that isn’t just arbit slice-of-life. I’ll be back home then, which’ll only increase the frequency of my posts, which will hopefully be on topics that’ll make everyone sit up and think.  I’m not promising anything, but I’ll try not to include the various species of moths that flit about my laptop when it’s all dark and the screen is the only source of light in the room, or the lizards that make it their prerogative to crap on my table every day.

I have plans for this place. I can’t let it be just another place to scribble my thoughts. There are other, smaller places for that. I notice I haven’t made full use of all the facilities WordPress offers me. There’s such a lot to write about, to write for, to write with that it doesn’t make sense to use this as a notepad.

No, I don’t mean I’ll make this place any less personal. I’ll, however, be more organized about my thoughts and writing and how I try and make sense of it all. Yeah, there’ll be the posts where I’m wondering what’s coming up, what’s happening, what I should do, and what I did, but they’ll be more readable, and they won’t be incoherent clumps of words and lines.

Things might not change all of a sudden after two weeks, or maybe the change won’t be apparent at all, but things certainly won’t be the same.

* To more Numbskullery! *

PS: If I’m found replying to comments or commenting on your blog for the next two weeks, please don’t hesitate to tell me off; it’s high time I learnt to live without the Net.

SEO done!

Shaastra’s SEO contest is finally done, after all the drama et al. The final results:

<from the website>

 

Announcement

The Google SEO contest has ended! Final positions:

1. Atrieecs http://atrieecs.seo.iitm.ac.in
2. Saarang http://saarang.iitm.ac.in
3. Priva Venkateshan http://priyaven.seo.iitm.ac.in

</from the website>

That’s my name there at number 3 alright, misspelling notwithstanding. Can’t stop grinning.

It’s not just the win. It’s the realization that there’s some sense left in the world. Participating in this contest had me know that you can’t hoodwink GoogleBot in the long run. Yeah, splogging techniques to get your site on top of search results might work for a couple of weeks, but that’s all it takes for the Bot to get wise to your tactics. Any small indication that your site is not for people and is for search engines, and your tactics start working against you. Content and quality are king on GoogleSearch. And that’s why it’s a hit.

Now for the credits… To all the people who gave me pointers on this and linked me up, gave me traffic, more notable of who would be Dad, without whose inputs I would’ve lost enthu,  TheG [and what a post that was!], CB, Gautham [was that a nice ad or was that a nice ad], my aunt Uma, Karthik Ram, Tony, Cindy, AJ, Tuhina and my wing-mates Malvika, Shilpi and Pubali.

Thanks a ton, guys!

Venting the Frusts.

I’m at it again. Reading English, August for what seems like the millionth time. I don’t know why I read it over and over again; I can quote it verbatim. It is by and far the most depressing work I’ve ever read. No, it isn’t like Nineteen Eighty-four which scares the willies out of you. It doesn’t gross you out like The Silence of the Lambs. It’s what is called a philosophical novel, a journey-of-sorts.

Once upon a time in Y2K2 when I was looking for some non-RK Narayan good Indian English fiction, I came across this orange paperback with a youngish Rahul Bose [and a green frog] on the cover. Like most others, I thought it was An English August. Images of the Scottish countryside came to my mind. Two pages into the book [I've a reputation in South Bangalore ... whoopsie... Bengalooru for finishing entire novels in the bookstore, which makes the proprietor of Prism bookstore in Jayanagar 4th Block shoot me piercing glances whenever I enter his store without mum, dad or any credit card-flashing elder], and I realized I was very wrong. The Hebrides gave way to the dustscape of Madna and other “dots in the hinterland”.

I’m grateful to Upamanyu Chatterjee for having written a book that saw me through some of the toughest spots in my short and mainly happy life, for having given a whole new dimension to worry.

Now I don’t have to worry ‘coz I don’t have a reason to worry. Get that previous sentence right. I can conjure up millions of reasons now to feel low. All ‘coz Agastya Sen and his anchorlessness had made more than just a deep impact on me.

My philosophy doesn’t stem from Ayn Rand or Paulo Coehlo or even Asimov, like it does for most losers out here who have no philosophy of their own, and hence go for these cults. No, I don’t have an English, August philosophy. It’s just that I identify more with megalopolitan Agastya than with people far far away who do big big things, use big big words which only emphasize their birdbrains [or that of the author]. The very fact that it isn’t about anything concrete appeals to me. For there will always be enough concrete worries in this world. We need someone to mope about the lesser things - about indecision, anchorlessness, about “What am I doing?” and “Where am I going?”. These questions acquire a new dimension when not placed in a life-or-death situation like those that form the bread-and-butter of most novelists.

But I digress. The whole point of this build-up was to get to the scene in the book where Agastya vents his frusts by stealing the Collector’s car keys. Well, I haven’t done anything that liberating, though I agree it would be just as good to hide someone’s contact-lens-cleaning fluid, or tinker with someone’s folder options, or break into someone’s system just to freak them out.

Some things that I just have to shout out loud:

• Worldspace Radio doesn’t have city-specific channels. There aren’t any portable models of WS receivers, or models for cars. It’d be really great if all that were possible, and if the subscription rate was so low that every dhobhi ghat had one. What I don’t get is that Vidhu Vinod Chopra could have talked about FM radio instead of WS which he gave us a very wrong idea about. Yup, it’s very wrong. For daring to make a movie with zilch research behind it.
• Section 377 says it’s illegal for people to have intercourse which goes against the laws of nature. Being gay is natural. Period.
• Barkha Dutt is unfit to host a nation-level talk show.
• You can’t make people accept homosexuality by just glamorizing it, and asking Vikram Seth to speak on it. You need to educate people on the whys and wherefores of Victorian and medieval Semitic reasoning, and how they are irrelevant in today’s world, and how the sexuality of a person is the last thing that matters in most aspects of life that discrimination by sexuality should be nonexistent.
• The world is unfair.
• Why does NITK spend thousands providing washing machines and repairing them when they go bust due to overuse? What’s the impediment in providing laundromats?
• The reward for hardwork is only more hardwork. Everything else is plain fringe benefits.
• I’m lazy. I hate it. And I’m not saying this just to sound ironical, but I’m too lazy to do anything about it. I don’t like saying it, it almost feels like it’s the truth by repeated assertion
• There are some opportunities that shouldn’t be given to everyone; they are to be earned.
• It’s irritating that the sixth most popular Indian blogger is an idiot who desperately tries to be funny, and succeeds in doing so in the eyes of her ardent readers. Bah! Says volumes about the sense of humor most people have. Their definition of a joke can be found in the gutters lining the road… or the spam that lines their inboxes.
• Most people have an exaggerated sense of importance about themselves. They think they matter more in others’ lives than they actually do. And that they have a larger say than they actually do.
• The Net is a dangerous place. Nothing is reliable. Proof: the third result for “NITK” on Google is this place. Yeah, the place where we whine about the lack of sensible people at college, the irritating aspects of day-to-day grind, and just general negative publicity. We’re not complaining, though.
• Apparently, hard work and truth always come out tops in the end.
• What’s Naples to us is Napoli to local Italians, and Rome is Roma to them. It’s anyway Bengalooru to us, so why bother asking the rest of the world to change the way they call us?
• Making slick-ish videos that look right out of Discovery channel is not the best a college can do for publicity. Space travel is far far away, and I don’t think it even gets mentioned in symposia.
• Life’d be a lot better if people didn’t pretend to be nice when they’re actually being nasty. The worst thing is being nasty with a nice demeanor.
• I hate it that people who can’t spell write blogs. That isn’t the point of providing such a service.
• I wonder why most people don’t understand that proclaiming oneself to be cool automatically debases the “cool” from you.
• I also wonder why people bother sending spam.
• What’s with vying to be called a tomboy? IMHO, tomboys are the enemies of feminism, and the worst is that most people don’t know that.
• This post isn’t going to change ANYthing, and I know it, and I’m still posting it.

This isn’t philosophy. It’s just wonder at why things can be changed so much to make life better. Why am I doing this? To prove I can be as good as Upamanyu Chatterjee in finding things wrong? Coz I think I’m a nobler-than-Atlas burden-shoulderer? Heck, nope. It’s coz I CAN.

Providence

Just when…

Just when you were feeling life couldn’t get any worse…

Just when mess food couldn’t get any suckier…

Just when you began to think people aren’t meant to be trusted…

Just when you got sick of shouting at the freshies for blatantly misusing and abusing the washrooms…

Just when you thought you CAN’T take another midsem, easy or otherwise…

Just when you really felt you SUFFERED from lack of sleep, and that another nightout would be only to save your life…

Just when you got irritated with the patterns and posters on your hostel room walls…

Just when you were sick of the same ol’ faces asking you ‘Hi, how ya doin?’ and not expecting anything other than ‘Fine, dude!’…

Just when you thought you’ve forgotten what it is to have fun…

Just when the humidity couldn’t get any worse…

Just when even the sight of unceasing waves didn’t calm you…

Just when you couldn’t feel any more wretched…

Just when you needed a break….

You book your tickets home; you’ve got six whole days off [ok, two of them self-declared], and you go home to good food, family, celebrations, sweets, unbroken sleep, pleasant surprises [Bangalore has finally got an international music station, Radio Indigo on FM 91.9. Yeah, the RJs sound rehearsed, but the music is JUST what the doctor ordered], and peace.

Here’s wishing a very happy and prosperous Deepavali to everyone!!!

The First Week

It hasn’t even been a week since I got back to college, and somehow the days don’t feel empty at all.

I got here on Saturday, and moved right in. Thank God mum was with me, else, I don’t know how I would have managed. By the way, my new room’s really nice, airy, with lots of light, and thankfully full mobile signal [such a relief from last year when I had to lean on the window to speak and wave my hand outside the window everytime I wanted to send a message] and the only thing that dampens my spirits are the various species of six-legged freaks I find dead on my table each morning.

Talking of insects, I seem to find loads of fireflies this time. I really wonder where they were the two years I was here. The first time I saw one, it was sometime in the middle of the night when I just opened my eyes, and thought my roommate had dropped her cell and that it was ringing on silent. They seem to have this weird electronic glow around them that first freaked the daylights out of me.

I seem to have some nice subjects this semester, not muggu ones like last semester. And I’m hoping they really are nice and fulfilling, unlike last time when the only 8086 microprocessor codes we were taught to write were ones to calculate the nth fibonacci number or to find the GCD and LCM of two numbers. We’re actually being taught by non-ALs [AL=Assistant Lecturer, and at NITK, is a vile curse ranging in intensity somewhere between 'illegitimate offspring' and 'perpetrator of fraternal incest'] this time, which is quite a relief after the nightmare that was last semester.

Now, it’s official that I can speak Japanese. I’ve got a certificate from Dr. Katta saying so, that’s how I know. All I can say is Domo arigato gozaimasu. And I mean it. Pun intended.

One of my favourite people has come up with the mother of all sorts of all things. Way to go, woman.

Last year this time, I was curious about my juniors, and was appalled by their bad behaviour and all that, but this time all of us don’t seem to care one bit. Why, I don’t even know who they are! Which is a big surprise as far as someone like me is concerned. My roommate happened to check out [and just that, nothing more, trust me. She can't hurt a fly for all the money in the world] her juniors [party fundae and suchlike things], and to our shock, they were running scared of us, and just excused themselves pleading illness and assignments to be submitted. And… the only interesting things I’ve noted about them are that one of them’s this Tamilian girl who speaks flawless Assamese, and another’s called Loon [yeah, Loon, really.... I'm not kidding or exaggerating here, Gawd, do Manipuris have weird names or what!]. Somehow them getting scared of us doesn’t give me a superior feeling or anything like that, which some people seem to crave.

While we’re on the subject….. Twelve second-years have been asked to vacate the hostel on counts of inappropriate conduct with juniors. Well, here’s wishing them all the best with their disciplinary action.

And I read Kaavya Vishwanathan’s magnum opus. I am pretty surprised Chetan Bhagat hasn’t joined in suing her… FPS and HOMGKGWAGAL both feel like the same book,-same walking-metaphor characters, un-taut plot, unfunny humor….. all essentially read-once-and-throw material.

SPIC-MACAY’s started off full swing, and I just spent an hour listening to our Faculty Advisor, the Convener and a few seniors telling us all about how good the movement [SPIC-MACAY's a movement, not an organization] was, so good that they couldn’t explain it, it was to be experienced. They turned emotional, and words failed them. Rather, their vocabulary.

I guess I’ll get to watch the club recruitment tamasha early next week as I’m not going home for the long weekend. The posters have started to come out, and we won’t have to wait long for the overdose of Photoshop. Already, I’ve been quizzed about the ’specialities’ of each club, what skills are to be possessed to get into each ‘tech’ club, whether you need to know HTML to get into CSI, how important all these are for the placement interviews, and what sort of questions to expect at a club interview, what to write on the resume, how to project yourself in an interview and a dozen other things that make me want to yell “Oracle and IBM are not gonna take you just ‘coz you screwed around with Photoshop for IE!”. On second thought, maybe they do, I don’t know.

I think this will be my latest post for quite some time to come, coz we haven’t yet got Net in the rooms, and the GB Net Centre has a one-hour restriction, which doesn’t at all give me a mood conducive to writing. Apart from that, the speed is really really slow this time, and the airconditioning doesn’t work, which makes even five minutes in this place highly unbearable.

Addendum: I wrote all this earlier in the evening, and now it’s 10 pm, and I’ve just discovered that my system has crashed. I don’t yet know what’s wrong with it, and nor can Poo, our resident software storehouse. The BIOS can’t seem to detect the hard drives! I’m hoping the problem disappears overnight, and the only other thing in the horizon is that the Acer guys will be laughing all the way to the bank.

I can’t help smiling, though. I’d just finished making backups coz I was planning to install XP and Ubuntu.

A Day Stolen?

         The youthful rays of the sun pass through the square glass paned windows of the mighty room and cast the shadow of the outline on the floor and on the glassware lying on the tables beside them. Keys are inserted into the locks and they click open. Hinges creak as the wooden panels attached to them are pushed. You can hear feet clatter and occasional exchanges of his and hellos. Chairs are pulled as neatly washed, starched and ironed lab coats sit down. Heads are bent down and all eyes are on crystal clear water and other multicolored liquids. There is an occasional sound of the centrifuge spinning at dizzying speeds or someone opening the oven. You can hear the drip-drop of extra pure water from the double distillation unit. Few people rush in and out of the room and mutter instructions to arbit lab coats. At times you can even smell the mixed smell of spirulina blue-green algae and freshly cut pineapples.

          Suddenly there arrives a little girl dressed in her school uniform with a brightly colored sweater on. Pappa asks his students to take care of her for a few hours. All eyes get distracted. They start noticing her pigtails. Someone tries to fill her empty water bottle with distilled water as she sings “twinkle twinkle”. They all start thinking beyond test-tubes and water-baths and Bunsen-burners. They teach her how when socks rolled down look like blue colored vada. Some even recollect the art of using colored pencils and caricature each other with markers. Another pushes aside his work aside and brings a few chocolates from somewhere. But the little moppet refuses it to reserve her tummy for pappa’s chocolates.

           Someone realizes its time for her to go. They all play “ Is that pappa’s car going over there?” Finally the little kid leaves but they still think of her.

           Guess it’ll take some more spirulina and a good night’s sleep for the lab coats to get over the girl’s charms.

On Resilience, Me-dia, Temple Controversies, You-th, ‘Being the Change’ and A Brand-New Dawn

Yes, this is another post triggered off by the Mumbai Train Blasts.

I wake up to Page 1 stories of Mumbai’s resilience. DH admires the spirit of the never-say-die city and ToI says Bombay has lost its spunk that it showed so well in the 1993 blasts. Great going, I felt, but something was missing…

An email forward which I guess most people would have read by now told me what it was. This forward is a letter to the terrorists telling them they can’t quell the spirit of the people or divide them yada yada yada. So far, so good. But hey, how come there is no one asking for some action? Have we become so accustomed to hearing about loss of lives that we are immune to it? I agree we shouldn’t disrupt normal life as far as possible, but that can be followed only when you are confident that your life is not in danger, when you know for sure that the government is going all out to protect you. How come no one is pressing for the terrorists to be booked? How come no one has yet talked about how it could have been prevented? Or about whether it could have been prevented? Or what we can do to prevent further such attacks? [And here, I am not taking into account ToI's page 2 today which tells us what to do when there's a terrorist attack in Bangalore]

Why this attitude of showing the other cheek? In other words, what’s the point of this forward? To tell the terrorist no matter what he does, he cannot cause mindless panic? But for how long? Well, the answer to that is easy: As long as human life is considered cheap in India. As long as the life in question doesn’t belong to a minority community which is a huge vote-bank.

I remember the news coverage of the 7/7 attacks. There wasn’t footage of gruesome, mutilated bodies like on CNN-IBN yesterday. They allowed their dead some dignity.

And the other main story in Toi-LeT paper is of the Sabarimala Temple Controversy. Reams and reams have been written pitying the lady’s plight, and on how unfair it is to bar women from entering a temple after this fading starlet confessed her sin of entering the temple. About how Lord Aiyappa is an MCP, a hypocrite. About how women need their God as they are so oppressed otherwise in society. I decline to say anything on the last two sentences, but I’ll say this: The temple has some rules. And you deserve punishment if you broke those rules. Whether the rules are baseless or not is another matter.

I’m ranting again about how our country is plagued with problems. And I know there’ll be atleast one person who tells me to ‘do something’ to solve the country’s problems, and to ‘be the change’. And I very well know where that person’s patriotism comes from. Heck, why do people bother to kill politicians? When one dies, there are another five equally bad ones to take their place. You can’t remove evil ideas just by removing their practitioners.
What we need is a revolution. Of a different kind. The slow kind. Which helps people change the way they think, their approach to life. For which the media need to stop being the ME-dia. For they are the voice of the people, who show what the public like and dislike. [Aside: going by ToI, you get a feeling that the Indian public are becoming increasingly asinine] I don’t know how to go about doing this, other than by being [or trying to be] a model citizen and inciting others to do the same.

Worse, there’s no alternative reality we can delude ourselves with, anymore [which makes us lose ourselves in make-believe creations of the media masquerading as the real thing- a fair example is RDB, and human interest crap on news channels is another]. We have a land of plenty right with us, and we now KNOW that we are the masters of our fates, we KNOW now that violent uprisings are of no use . Sure, we keep wishing our situation was better, and the possible ways by which that would have been achieved, like maybe communism, but we really KNOW now that you can’t keep a people shackled for long. We all know that the only way to change things is by tiny things, by collective will, by making our own informed decisions, for all the heroes we looked up to in these sixty years of independence had feet of clay.

<>We shouldn’t blindfold ourselves and pretend nothing’s wrong with the world that can change our way of doing things. We need to believe in a new kind of affirmative action, the results of which we might not immediately see, but moves us to an entirely different way of thinking, which, by chance, might just turn out to be better than the current situation.

Yeah, I want to change things out here. Mainly coz I’m alternating between demented with happiness and demented with shock at having read my palm from a trusty book on the subject and discovering that I’m going to be assassinated.

Colours of life

Odd day of the week. Only reason why you wake up is your stomach. The clock is near the right angle. I drag myself out of the bed. I grab a rubbery sort of thing and butter all my fingers. I crawl the long way back to my room and push myself under the bedsheet. There is a pillar in the middle. I stare into it. There is a breeze and the top pages of the pillar flutter. A finger comes brandishing with the wind. The binary numbers are dancing around it. The fingers, the numbers and the pillar are surrounded by a ring. The ring is made up of the letters ‘e’,’n’,’g’,’i’,’n’,’e’,’e’,’r’. There is a huge glass beaker filled with crabs. One is trying with all its might to climb out. Another is pulling it down. There is fox in the well. A goat jumps in. The fox climbs on it and gets out. A snake slithers from behind and strikes with a vicious hiss. There is pyramid. I’m standing somewhere midway. The people at the top look below and laugh their heads off. There is a great thunder in the background. I push myself out of the cosyness and pull the latch. There is a downpour on me. Someone’s thrusting coloured powder into my hand. I’m startled and I throw it around. Everyone scream with joy and cry ‘Happy holi’.

The Unreasonable Man

“A reasonable man tries to adapt himself to the world, but an unreasonable man makes the world adapt to him and all progress depends on the unreasonable man”

Imagine how everything would be if life went like this… the sun rises…the cock crows…You get up…Do your daily chores…etc.etc…Take a nap…wakeup again…etc.etc…sleep for another eight hours and the wheel moves on. Boring isn’t it? Don’t you think there is a need for a change? For something, out of the ordinary, past the mundane, off the beaten track?
It is only when someone thinks that things ought not to be the way they are that there is progress.

History tells us the same thing. Imagine how the world would be if some unreasonable man hadn’t decided to rebel againt the roman empire?…We would still be seeing half-naked men draped in shawls with olive reeds on their heads,olympics would always be held in Athens.And Gaul would still be defending itself? True, Rome wasn’t built in a day. But still, I like the present day world better.
Think of how the world would be if Jesus Christ hadn’t spread “the good word of god”?Majority of the world wouldn’t have a man on a cross, dangling on a chain, around their necks.
Or if Christopher Columbus hadn’t decided to go against the Turks and take the sea route to India?…We still wouldn’t know that the American continents existed.
Think of how the world would be if Gandhi hadn’t decided to use the yet-unheard-of methods of Sathyagraha and Non-violence to fight against the colonisers?…The sun still wouldn’t set on the British empire.
Think of what would’ve happened if Hitler hadn’t decided to overrule the Versailles Treaty? Germany would’ve burnt its boots. And most of all Democracy wouldn’t have as strong a hold in Eurasia as it has now.
So, I think that its only change which brings progress to the world and hence would want to make it the motto of my life ( Until, ofcourse, some “unreasonable” man decides that it should change)

I’ve been Tagged!

I wouldn’t be writing this if i had anything else to write. Still, can’t complain….thnx to Maverick..
Neways…here goes!

Three names i go by:
Priya - that’s the official one
Puri - that was what my friends called me at school
and the rest are, well, unprintable, they are what my sis calls me when I wake her up.

Three screen names :
I would like…hmmm… Arundati Ray. A combi of the geniuses Arundati Roy and Satyajit Ray.
Maybe when I cut my first music album, I can call myself Beatless…[That's The Beatles with an xtra s]
And most definitely….NITK Numbskull.

Three things that i like about myself:
I can type really fast
My voice echoes really well in the bathroom.
I can spread gossip really fast!

Three things that scare me the most:
No internet!
The quality of teachers in IT dept. of NITK Surathkal.
That I need yahoo chat to get communicating with the gal next to me.

Three things that I want in a relationship:
1.Its practical non-existence…hey, i wanna be single and ready to mingle.
2. 1 above
3 1 and 2 above.

Three physical things about the opposite sex that appeal to me:
1. hmmm…..
2. hmmmmmm………
3. hmmmmmmmmmmm……..cash?

Three things that i want to do badly now:
Get a Worldspace Satellite Receiver in my hostel
Rag the first year showoffs Real Bad! [more on this l8er]
Go swimming.

Three places i want to go on a vacation:
Colombo
The Hebridian Isles
sumatra

Three things to do before i die:
Complete my 16 failed novels
Take a year off life and do adventure sports and lotsa bigtime eating.
Learn to write well.

Three of my every day essentials:
my comb
toothbrush
and FOOD!

Three things i’m wearing right now:
clothes
spectacles [tuhina's]
nailpolish

Three people im gonne tag :
Finance Freak and Speed.thepundeets.blogspot.com
aravind

My beautiful Mysore

This is an essay, I wrote in 6th standard for a competition conducted by the local newspaper, The star of Mysore. I won the second place and it was published in the newspaper.

Born on 22nd of September 1986 in Mysore, I have spent most of the time here. Whenever I get a chance to go out of Mysore, I do not miss it. But my mind will always be thinking of Mysore- My beautiful Mysore.
Why? I ask myself. I find that it is not easy to answer this. God has been very kind and generous in giving my city a nice hill- Chamundi hill-which I am told is older than the Himalayas!! Mysore has beautiful tanks like Karanji tank and the Kukkerahalli tank.
From our history books I have learnt that my city has a grand past. The contribution of the Wodeyars, who ruled over Mysore for a long period, made it their capitol, did so many nice things to my city. They have built palaces, nice wide roads, gardens, temples etc. I also learnt that Sir. Mirza Ismail worked very hard to beautify our city.
When I read the history books, hear things about old Mysore from my grandmother and compare with the city I see now, I often get puzzled. Why does it look so dirty, shabby and sound so noisy now? Then I realize it’s the dirt we throw around, the motor vehicles we ride or drive around, not stopping to think whether we really need it.
Then I start dreaming, dreaming of a beautiful Mysore, may be the Mysore of the days when my grandmother was a young girl like me. In that draem the roads are very clean and tidy, without potholes!! green grass on the pavements on either sides. Shady trees everywhere, lots of birds and no bikes and cars. Only bicycles and Mysore tongas everywhere may be as in China (my mother has told me that in China most of the people use bicycles to go to their workplaces, schools etc.,) The vacant plots with grass and shrubs with lot of flowers and no dust at all. Also no pollution.
Alas! I soon realized it’s a dream, after all a dream.
But then, why can’t we, you and I work to make my dreams- may be also your dreams come true?