Sanctuary

It’s been long since I left home. 8 years now. I have been traveling. That’s how I advertise it. I think I should stop (not advertising, which is also my profession by the way). I’ve had enough, traveling. Nothing new. They are all the same. No matter how much I hate the institution, it’s always great to be going home, mom-dad’s home, do some thing for them, nothing exorbitant but like cook for them. Cook whatever I’ve learnt over the years. Make a drink for Dad and ask him, hey…have you tried whiskey with apple juice? I know it’s not his taste but I want him young. I am sure he’ll say no and I’ll anyways make him one. Dad, feeling and getting old is the worst sight I can picture. Mom’s stable, in fact she is the brighter side of the family. Surprising how mother’s still have a sense of humour, are laid back, and still in-charge. Dads have given up by this age. Haven’t they?

Bros coming down too. So I’ve thought of giving him some gyan about how things are and how they need to be dealt with (things: life). May be he’ll give me some gyan, his way, like he always does. That’s how Christmas is going to be. Its going to be a regular Christmas but after a long long time. Two years, but it sure seems like a very long time.

Merry Christmas!!!

Rest In Peace

The Mad Cow Disease and an Albanian

Why one, all the cows here have gone mad, exclaimed Shpend. His friends never gave s**&% in spite of Shpend’s potentially dung beetle attracting, sticky armpits. But Shpend was a gem. A human being, who would risk his life for an aimlessly wandering goat that has strayed into the butcher’s courtyard. An Albanian national (if that helps you to picture him), Shpend will be fifty this January or November or was fifty two years back or may be he’s eighteen, how does it matter? After being separated from his wife, he now lives near the prairies of Kazakhstan bordering the Gobi desert – alone – no one else lives there, even in the far vicinity.

Till a couple of years ago, Shpend worked with a Natural Gas Exploration Company, a semi-government organization in France. He was a driller, the one responsible for making the first contact with mother earth, after which the machines would eventually take over. He was proud of it. It’s human. To be the first one in a chain of globally consequential events. His work took him places. Once even to the Falkland Islands.

cont.

cybergranny sez

"No one listens to old people."
- María Amelia López
the oldest blogger in cyberia apparently has 340,000 hits on her blog

"Everyone leaves Calcutta after using it."
- a begger woman i met in Park Street

genius IS what genius SAYS

"Leck mich im Arsch recht fein schön sauber"
(lick me in the arse nice and clean)
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Kashmir - Led Zepp

What does it have to do with the Kashmir we know of, PoK or IoK. Ostensibly, Plant wrote the song while driving through the Sahara Desert. Such is life.

IF

If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.
- Woody Allen

The Truth

Football
Orgasm
Death

Everything else is a compromise.

There is no such thing as FOREVER...

"They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever."
- Oscar Wilde

I thought, even I was doing the same,i.e. trying to make it last forever and then I got the answer…

“If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it, and all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.”
- Ernest Hemingway

This could be true of any City, but it doesnt happen everywhere.

You know, Calcutta is so overrated by the intelligentsia. Ask the lads there gathered at an adda smoking bidis, and chatting about everything, from Jose Mourinho's riff with his clubs owner to Kobita (their classmate) not having tits at all (fanka maath, empty field in english). It happens everywhere, the gossip, if not Jose Mourinho then definitely the Kobita stuff.

Untill not-so-long ago these guys wandered aimlessly, singing Nachiketa songs, inebriated. But I hear they've all got jobs with the call-centers in Calcutta and with other call-centers in the country.

Shantanu aka Kanu, works in Bangalore now. And like any other Bengali good-boy, he has to visit his Maaaaaaaaa at least twice a year (nothing Oedipal about it, let’s not read much). He was part of the group described above and is one of the guys doing quite well in life, monetarily.

Kanu left Bangalore in the morning for Cal. He took a flight. It’s economical and within reach now, you know. Nothing special happened at the airport or inside the shuttle bus or inside the bigger bus. No sexy chicks by his side, no naughty airhostesses. In fact the airhostesses were shabby with stains on their uniforms. I mean yeah…wut do you expect of a no frills airline.

Contd.

The becoming of Nihilists

Man has an unreasonable ‘fate’, a ‘destiny’ that is controlled solely by the surroundings around him. He cannot by himself be happy or sad, let alone the realities of choosing a career, a job, a woman, a society, and acquiring a taste (although there are certain elements that always give you a high – like the first spell of rain after an arid summer). But that has hardly anything to do with the capitalist-free-market society, where everything comes on a platter. It becomes all-the-more unacceptable if, even in your weirdest of whims, you choose to go slightly off tangent (in the aforementioned categories and more).

In such a scenario what does one do? Let’s first be clear. There is nothing called fate or destiny. These concepts are as archaic as they sound. As you come to terms with life and yourself, you realize that things are so meticulously programmed, that more than half the population you live with, doesn’t even have a clue of what you are talking about. Therefore you sit back and contemplate of altering your reality. But you also immediately realize that it’s not as easy as they had taught you in the college or university.

So you buy time…you buy time to decide. Decisions are very important to existence. Being sure of what you want. Being sure of your “happiness”.

yours truly@GoaFest

Impressionable Ears

I don’t know what state of mind to be in right now to write this blog. JNU and the class of 2003 CGS/SLLCS (for those who left), (it’s an integrated course mind you, i.e. till you finish your PG. So there can be two classes of pass outs even if they get enrolled in the same year) has been a cauldron of emotions; gyan, love, bonding, friendship, tutelage and of course communism, though there was a minority of unreasonable guys and girls with the youth wing of the BJP (OP, Nitin, Alok take it with a pinch). Not that my comrades were a reliable lot.

I was thinking of coining a punch-line for the esteemed institution and probably thought of this one as apt – “a dope of education”.

Well, not digressing from the narrative, my class was a heavily dominated class (taking Taran’s perspective on this) dominated by people from a particular region, including me, I don’t live too far away. The only ones from other parts of India were Taran (Delhi), Tashi (Delhi, she doesn’t like being called Tashi, there’s definitely lots of things in a name, sorry Herr Shakespeare), Pallavi (Ajmer, god knows where she is now) Roshan (Jodhpur) and oh yes, we had a Russian boy, Eugene (Russian Embassy, New Delhi, this guy was a high-tech cheater-cock). Nishant, Meenal and Ranjini joined the class in the second year to make it "more" cosmopolitan group.

\

gotta go but i'll get on with it, its fun...

Art: Bala, Copy: Me

Art: Bala, Copy: Me

Death - Harold Pinter

Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?

Who was the dead body?

Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?

Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?

Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?

What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?

Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body

Hyderabad: Courtesy - Ganesh Bankupalli

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welcome

Yeah!!!

Friends, as the title suggests, this space is conceptualised to accomodate almost everything. My intention was to create a hodge-podge of all the things that make at least some sense, somewhere in our minds.

Lets see how far and for how long i am able to decently maintain this space.

With these few words, I welcome you all.