Finishing line

Good gravy, I’ve almost missed another month. I know it looks like I’ve been away from here for a long time, but I haven’t really. In the process of starting my Tumblr page, I may have left behind my November post in favour of ‘micro-blogging’, but that was just a minor oversight. I’m still here, and Tumblr will only be my new graffiti wall, not mind space.

The time for retrospection, revelry and resolutions is upon us and most everyone around my age is under great pressure to be happy. Appropriately enough, I’ve been looking back at myself over the past year to find the bright spots and the not-so-bright ones, all essential to passing the time. While there were enough low points that I’d rather not dwell upon, one memory certainly stood out as a highlight to remember for a long time yet.

So far, I have never been in an unsuccessful interview. Or rather, I have passed every interview that I have ever attended (and having said that, I hope I haven’t jinxed myself). Early this year, I was the subject of a totally unconventional interview, conducted by a young lady who was obviously quite experienced at this sort of thing. She had with her a notepad in which she recorded my every answer, which kinda made me nervous, but I wasn’t sure why. On the subject of names, she first struggled through spelling mine, but was then quite giddy when she found out that she shared my mother’s first name.

She then asked me to show her my home city on a globe of the world and then had me calculate the amount of time it took to get from Point A to Point B. Contrary to a regular interview, she wasn’t concerned with the process, only the final answer; she was quite satisfied with mine. After that, she suggested that I shift home.

Of course, there was a cultural disparity since we were from different countries, which was probably why she was so interested in every little detail that I provided. But I still couldn’t believe my lucky streak; yet another interview in which I could do no wrong! At one point, she even high-fived me when she found out that I enjoyed Jolly Rancher candy as much as she.

And then we had dinner and she gulped down all of the root beer I had brought along.

I really should mention that she was 8 years old.

KT Tunstall – Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)

Koop – Strange Love

And now, the news

Ok, I haven’t had time to write something special for today, so I give you this delightfully horrific little story by Edgar Allan Poe: Read!


On a side note, too bad about poor Caroline Wozniacki’s on-court spasm. Although, I’ll bet that video of her cramping up is really popular on the Internet and her grandchildren will probably watch it when they’re old enough to surf the net unsupervised!


Warren Zevon - Werewolves of London
Michael Jackson - Thriller

When September Ends

One of my favourite cinematic scenes is when someone crashes through a wall. No matter if the wall looks like it was constructed of papier-mâché, it’s still a greatly dynamic instant. I’m pretty sure I can’t break through a regular wall, but drywall is very much within the realm of possibility! Idly dreaming during (sometimes unnecessarily) long work meetings, I can imagine myself busting through the wall into the adjacent conference room. And just in case that isn’t intimidating enough to the unassuming folks on the other side, I can also be green and make caveman-ish sounds. Easy peasy!

I know I have a long way to go still, but at some point during the journey I would like to experience the event that becomes my story. Many people have many stories to tell, some more than others, but only a few have the story, the tale they tell that stokes the ember of interest in every listener. Whether horrific, fantastic or ecstatic, the story never fails to enrapture its audience. And I don’t mean the fluff you might catch in a break room, cafeteria or around the water cooler. This is serious stuff; the kind of stuff that is passed down within families, from generation to generation, changing ever so slightly with every new retelling but never forgoing the wonder of the original. In fact, the story is narrated so often by its owner, that with every passing year it either evolves into something more fanciful than before, or loses some of its less major elements to the clutches of time.

Unfortunately, I have no follies of youth to speak of, no movie-style romantic trysts, nor had any adventure that can be recounted with great gusto and pride. I might say my existence is absolutely unremarkable at present, if only that wasn’t such a cliché for someone my age. Unlike the general trend, I like to look at my life from the outside in, thus requiring more than just a personal sense of satisfaction or achievement to be suitably happy. Which doesn’t mean that I yearn for acknowledgment or approval by the people that surround me; on the contrary, it doesn’t matter as much as my own critique when I look back in at the events that have gone by and continue to do so, shaping my path through time. Narcissistic though it may seem, I think honest retrospection and self assessment does me well, rather than enduring the condescending, biased or disinterested opinions of others.

I don’t want to be greedy in wanting everything at once without having paid the price by facing the rigours of lice life, but I also hate having to think of an unpredictable future in which dreams can be forgotten or snuffed out in an instant, without anyone ever knowing they existed. This has certainly been the nature of things from time immemorial, but I don’t think it’s unfair to want a highlight before it’s too late. I don’t know, maybe it’s all this dreary rain that’s got me edgy and maybe tomorrow I won’t even feel the same way. But at the moment, this is my retrospection and I don’t want to lose it.

“Your world is nothing more than all the tiny things you left behind.”

The Turtles – Elenore

Skeeter Davis – The End of the World

Slither In

As far back as I can remember in my adult life, I’ve been waiting for my own ‘falls to his knees’ moment. It’s the much dramatised scene in which our protagonist falls to his (or her) knees, utterly overwhelmed. Maybe exhaustion from rescuing pensioners out of a burning building, or relief as they spy an oasis from afar after thirsty days in the desert wilderness, or even in reverent awe as they watch a projection of God himself descended to the Earth.
I’ve wanted it not so much for the drama involved, but rather for the spontaneous feeling that ignites the moment. You obviously don’t plan for it, and I don’t think many people like being on their knees, so when it does happen it’s likely the effect of a profound emotion. And that is something I think I need to experience.

It’s not hard to be weathered by the world so that you’re desensitised to where you barely betray or even feel much emotion. There are only phases in life when you actually care about shit. I mean when you really, truly give a fuck about shit. Any shit, however inane or intense, as long as you wake up to the day with a thought in your head that you really believe in. But after a point, the journey seems to take a common turn for most people, irrespective of which walk of life they are from (I say most people because I obviously haven’t met all people. I haven’t met most people either, but I’m surely allowed to take creative liberties in my assumptions, without going to hyperbolic extremes). You learn to take things as they come, finding ways to deal with or work around hiccups along the way. You’re doing well, always looking to ‘get ahead’ in the old rat race but hardly noticing the slow countdown that runs unerringly in the background while you take baby steps towards inescapable doom.

There needs to be an awakening, a break from the mundanity that creeps up on you in the guise of life-as-it-has-been-foretold. Enough of this urban bullshit. Forget the work week. Nevermind making plans for the weekend. I need to feel something. I need to feel emotion well up to where it has to bust out of me. I need to cry till I run myself dry, I need to laugh till I can’t bear the aching, I need to rage till I’ve forgotten the very the reason. And all these things shall make me happy and tired and alive.


“Can’t seem to get it together. I’m twenty six years old. I’m healthy, I’m capable, I’ve had every opportunity. My friends are getting married and having kids… and I’m just so far away.”

Nikka Costa - Call Me
Glen Hansard / Markéta Irglová - When Your Mind’s Made Up

Twilight of the Thunder God

I’ve decided to re-try my hand at something I haven’t done in a long, long time - reading. It’s been a while since I last perused something in print other than a price tag or the occasional newspaper headline so this is a big step for me.
For some reason I felt compelled to choose Douglas Scott Adams’ first book, although I have never really read his comic strip and even confess to hating it for no particular reason. Today, I began.

I have a tendency to try and find glimpses of myself in any fiction I read before I actually imbibe any of the intended content. Although I haven’t done much in recent times, old habits are meant to die hard, and in keeping with this fine tradition I was soon thinking how alike in thinking we were and how I had missed out on being a syndicated caricateur (I think this word sounds WAY better than ‘caricaturist’; unfortunately most dictionary folk don’t see eye to eye with me. And maybe Adams isn’t really a caricateur but I don’t give much of a fuck, ‘cos that isn’t the point) and an author. But there was a lingering uneasiness even as I got through to every next page, as though I was trying to write with the wrong hand or kick with the wrong foot (I’m no soccer player). 38 pages later, I gave in and turned back to my laptop instead. Guilt, me, awash with it. But luckily, I can live with that!

It has come to my attention that my writings are being found by those who would seek fruitful information and are accordingly dismayed when they come upon my posts, misleadingly titled such that they are irrelevant to the immediately following matter. Besides, the incongruity can’t be helping my credibility with Google search, whatever it may be. Be that as it may, I shall continue as before, to use titles that bear little or no resemblance to the actual posts they are associated with, other than to provide an additional point to ponder, perhaps.

Floyd: Heard anything from that girl recently? I haven’t. Have you?


I’m always thinking one step ahead, like a carpenter… that makes stairs.

Roxy Music – If There Is Something
Jon Secada – Just Another Day

Verkhoyansk

A couple of weeks ago just as I was leaving for work, I saw this lady come out of the neighbouring building. About mom-sized and, as is the norm around here, wrapped in a million scarves. Big deal, I think, and carry on my way happy with the thought I’d thunk that I’d be long gone before she even extracted her keys from her hideous purse. Instead, I eventually found myself behind her on the road, trying desperately not to gun the throttle and smash into her tail light out of frustration. Not only was she going my way, all the way, she somehow constantly managed to stay ahead of me, slowing down only at every turn, where she seemed too timid to maintain her momentum.

So I had to take her out before she caused me further embarrassment and potentially endangered the life of the mother of her children. A few nicks and bruises never hurt anyone.

I have a phobia of bodily penetrations. Before that statement is misconstrued to be what it isn’t, I should add that I mean bodily penetrations by inorganic objects. Hmm… Ok pointy metallic objects, more precisely. Dammit that still sounds dirty. Ok, I will narrow it down to knives. When blade meets flesh, that’s when my balls literally jump up into my body and wait there till it’s safe to descend again.
For many years, I tried to figure out if there really was something to this ‘stomach churning’ business, as others have put it, but I’ve only recently understood that the most profound effect an external stimulus can have is on my testicles.

And all this medical jargon is reminding me of another thing I hate. Doctors. And the thing I hate more than doctors – doctors who don’t agree that you’re as sick as you feel. I mean it’s a helluva medical anticlimax when you go to the doctor and then undergo a bunch of tests expecting to find conclusive evidence that your spine is horribly mis-shapen, which is the cause of your incredible pain, and after all that he tells you to go home and take an aspirin. Hell, if I’m paying you 400 bucks for consultation plus 1,500 for the tests, at least humour me and say I MIGHT have a horribly mis-shapen spine, which is the cause of my incredible pain!
Or at least have a hot nurse draw my blood. The rest I can deal with.


For the accompanying image: I swear I don’t remember where I got the original. If you read this and happen to be the artist, creds to you. At least I’m not using it for commercial purposes and so you can’t sue me, right? Right?

“This isn’t goodbye, it’s great-bye!”

Robert Palmer – Simply Irresistible
Imogen Heap – Hide and Seek

RIP, Michael. I still love ya.

Advice from my ATM

I had an unusual dream a couple of nights ago that I will now dwell on for my own amusement – I dreamed I was colourizing an episode of I Love Lucy. I know that you aren’t supposed to remember dreams because of REM sleep and all that jazz, but I do recall them sometimes, as I’m sure most people do. Every time I manage to recollect a dream, it is vivid enough for me to break down into parts that I can relate to occurrences in the previous day, at least on some level. This rationalizing allows me to scoff at all those dream readers.
This time though, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what brought Lucille Ball into my sleeping consciousness. I don’t remember any other faces or sounds from that dream, not even Ricky; just her. And her red dress and her red hair.
I don’t like loose ends. This is going to trouble me for a while now.

On a less unusual note, change is in the air. Not just the weather, but me too. I’ll be 26 shortly and before I do that, I’m shedding some skin. Less cursing through the traffic is a start; instead I’d rather enjoy the ride and musical accompaniment. More outdoor activity is another chapter of this new edition. I’m getting used to a gym locker room and hopefully, I’ll soon be emulating a namesake with a racquet in my hand. The best part of all this is that I get to roam around in shorts. It doesn’t matter that the little girls sitting in a row along the garden fence giggle whenever I pass them, this is the calmest I’ve been in a very long time.
There will always be empty spaces that need filling, but I think there are some that need to be filled first so that you can move on to the rest. Maybe I’ve started right.


“Every time I lay you down in that damn crib, I'm gonna think, ‘Damn baby. Damn Crib.’”

Amber – This Is Your Night
Ludacris – Get Back

The Report

That’s it! I, am hereby, herein, hereforth AND herewith done with aging... From now on, I’m getting younger by the minute!

Fort Minor - Remember The Name
Bobby Vinton - Blue Moon

Unnecessary acks

Some stuff I found. Not sure how long ago I wrote this.

For giving me an excuse to sing out loud: Queen
For giving me an anthem: John Lennon
For always listening to whisperings: Pepe, the paranoid parakeet
For holding open the door to life before and after me: The Beatles, The Jetsons
For keeping alive a spark of religiosity, no matter how shamelessly small or elusive: Mother
For the sound of romance in spite of today: Norah
For being an ideal, not a stereotype: Dad
For giving me something I can rock out to when there’s nothing left: Metallica
For letting me be a kid: Superman, Hanson
For letting me grow up: Bon Jovi, The Spice Girls (yes, it’s true)
For the hotness: Jennifer Connelly
For existing: Zooey Deschanel
For tears: Forrest Gump
For a life bound in music: Millions of unknowingly generous users on the World Wide Web
For proving to me that life’s a female dog: You know who you are
For grounding: Friends four
For being a dork: Richie Cunningham
For not kicking my ass: Nan, when I walked in on her in the bathroom; Uncle Norbert, when I walked in on him in the bathroom
For keeping me out of showers for a *very* long time: Jaws (no thanks for that)
For cool: The Rock, No Doubt, Fonzie
For my first read: Oliver Twist
For one free drink: Steve the bartender
For just happening: The 80s, The 90s
For the funk: Prodigy
For being way more awesome than “Friends”: Seinfeld
For pampering: My first 9 schoolteachers
For looking up to me: Rucha

Floyd: Nice choice of pictures. The last one may have been questionable; this one makes the entire page completely gay!


“If I had to choose her or the sun, I’d be one nocturnal son of a gun”

Kelly Clarkson – My Life Would Suck Without You
Jason Mraz – I Melt With You

Seriously.

Dammit February, you’ve screwed me over with your 28-day fashion. By the time I’d realized the month was out, I didn’t have anything ready to post. So I may try to make it up this month; or I may not. Whatever.

I’ve done it so many times now, that the “airport post” has become quite predictable. I can’t help it though, because I generally have an unreasonably long wait at every major airport I visit, so I see stuff and save my thoughts for a more composed expression that is NOT a Tweet.
Airports are quite predictable too. And by airports, I don’t mean just the airports themselves, but the people inside them as well. There are the families who try to enjoy the whole experience and count the airport wait as part of their vacation fun, and the families who can’t keep the kids in control and end up cursing the vacation before it even starts. Then you have your casual travelers who generally have their MP3 players out with some light reading and a snack, distancing themselves from the rest of the world till their boarding gate opens, followed by the newly-baptised/try-too-hard IT professionals who, in an attempt to blend in, will always appear with their Grishams and Coelhos in hand and a notebook case in tow, not to forget the mandatory cup of gourmet coffee and the overdone outfit. And finally, the seasoned travelers, who, whether they’re out for business or pleasure, always know how to best utilise their time without having to turn to music and/or fiction.

I didn’t think I’d be seeing Heathrow so soon again, but that’s how it happened. Out of boredom, I tried to look at a different dimension this time around… Oh the boots! I love ‘em in all shapes and sizes. I worked out that a good pair of boots could move a girl up from plain average to attractive. But, the wait was long and owing to the fairly large difference in time zones from when I got onto the airplane and when I stepped off it, it wasn’t long before my eyes began to roll back in their sockets and mysterious but hot women came floating by to ask me hot but mysterious questions like Haven’t you been chewing that gum far too long? and Try on my underwear?

Switching topics, so many movies (read: Romantic Comedies) show the guy who dates this rebound chick after he loses the main lady in his life, who is in fact so hot AND so well rounded that losing her is probably the greatest sin on earth that should actually leave him depressed for life. But the world keeps turning and so he decides to get back into the dating scene and looks for the shallow women who can keep him amused so that he doesn’t need to think of what he recently lost. Inevitably, he runs into his ex-lady love at just the place they shouldn’t have met, after which one or both of them remembers that they were so good together and they were fools to ever let each other go. Here’s where our boy unceremoniously dumps the new girl with a condescending hug and smile as if to say you’re a helluva lay, but you don’t stimulate me intellectually. But don’t worry, it’s not your fault you’re a boob.
Did it ever occur to him, or anyone else for that matter, that the reason this chick seemed so shallow could have been because that was exactly how every guy she’d been with treated her, without allowing her a chance to exhibit anything more than her physical talents (if at all)?

Freaky moment of the year: I was downloading David Bowie’s Major Tom (or Space Oddity, if you want to call it that) when Winamp pulled up Peter Schilling’s Major Tom at the exact moment the download began. And the preceding song? Tom’s Diner (DNA/Suzanne Vega).

“I’ve got two tickets to Iron Maiden, baby
Come with me Friday, don’t say maybe…”


Crowded House – Don’t Dream It’s Over
The Subways – Rock ‘N Roll Queen

Moonlight over Rome

From recent events, I’d say it’s fair to assume that people WANT to think they are victims of racism, because it’s an easy way to reject criticism of themselves. People WANT to think they are being projected badly to the rest of the world, people WANT to think they are being looked down upon. In fact, I’d say that is close to being an Indian trait. It is an effort to gain a sympathy vote and to give ourselves an excuse to think that we are better than we really are.
I’ve been reading positive as well as negative reactions on this movie, by Indian as well as non-Indian viewers. While some people rightly compare it to Cidade de Deus, others find the comparison horrifying and still others find the movie cheesey and just don’t see what all the fuss is about. One thing is for certain though: very few are ambivalent in their opinion on this film.

Slumdog Millionaire has got itself 10 Academy Award nominations, which I find quite surprising ‘cos I’ve watched it and while it was good, I didn't think it was SO good that people start bestowing superlative praise and golden statuettes upon it.
As an Indian, I would think one is torn between two opinions: you want to say it was a good movie because it was engrossing and well made and thus brought acclaim to the Indians involved in its creation. You also want to say it was horrible, because although it was about India, it was a movie by an Englishman that showed the worst side of the country. Abject poverty, violent and perverse slum life and children who are never children at all; City of God did that too.

Plenty of folks passing judgment on this movie seem to label India a “third world country” in which the events depicted were bound to happen because of the living standard. The fact is, while we sit in our ivory towers, that is exactly what most Indians think of the slums too… a “third world country” within the country. I know because I am one of those most Indians.
I don’t agree with these foreign labelers, but I don’t blame them either because if you watched this movie with no presumptions about India, you’d probably feel the same way too. I found the observation of a celebrity columnist in a local newspaper to be quite apt when she opined that the world would want to see what life was like in this Indian city that was only recently targeted by terror attacks, which would be one of the reasons driving them to watch this movie. Unfortunately, for many, this will be how they discover India. This is what they get for their curiosity. A nice little (all of 120 minutes) film that depicts life in a country they probably know exists somewhere out there, at its worst but interwoven with real drama, undying love and culminating in an expected fairytale ending, complete with a gratuitous song and dance sequence.
It’s just a shame that it took a firang to put it on display for the world, when the story was already written in our own backyard.


If You Seek Amy... lingua magnifica!

“You! Yes, you behind the bikesheds... stand still laddie!”

Prodigy – Breathe
Jimmy Ray – Are You Jimmy Ray?