Deppe recommends

Song of the Month
At my former workplace, at exactly noon every single day, they switched on the music in the cafeteria to indicate that lunch was ready to be served. And on every single day during the 3 and a half long years I worked there they played the same tape over and over again: Kenny G. The sound of the sax got so strongly associated with thoughts of food, that if Pavlov hadn't discovered conditioned reflexes, I surely would have. But unlike the famous dog, I never salivated; the thought of the bad food just prompted some disconcerting peristalsis. I came to hate the sax. The instrument did redeem itself at the hands of the uncle who performs live at Java City every weekend. But a few weeks ago I heard Morphine and completely forgave the saxophone.Comprising of a drummer, a guy who plays two saxophones simultaneously and a vocalist with a powerful voice who plays a guitar with just two strings in it, they produce some simple but very distinctive sounds. Deppe especially recommends the song 'Scratch'.

Book of the month
Marquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'. As the narrative effortlessly swings back and forth between a quaint fantasy world and a captivating latin american reality, you are lulled into a listening mode where you don't even notice realism being sacrificed. Six generations are chronicled in a little over 500 pages (Joyce wouldn't be able to explain an orgasm in that many !) so the book has a very racy pulse to it. The only piss-off is that all the characters are either called 'Arcadio' or 'Aureliano'. All of Aureliano's kids - 17 out of marriage and a couple legits- are all called Aurelianos. Its understandable if a psycho like Michael Jackson calls his kids Michaels I, II and III ( thats a true fact!), but in general I never understood the philosophy behind the father and son having the exact same name. Definitely made history confusing- I never could be sure if it was Louis the 14th or the 40th that was guillotined, and which of the King Georges was loony. Extremely irritating!

Movie of the Month
Jarhead is about the first of the gulf wars and about the frustrating inaction that the ground troops experienced; the first shots they fired were at the sky to celebrate victory. Evidently inspired by Full Metal Jacket, this movie has its moments too. Considering that his first movie was an all-time great (American Beauty) and his second(Road to perdition) was pretty nice too, this is relatively disappointing, but my verdict is still that Sam Mendes is yet to make a bad movie.

Krikket

Krishnamachari Srikkanth; remember the dashing opening batsman in the 80s, who retired from cricket to turn into a professional clown.
He's doing pretty well for himself. He is reportedly paid millions to appear in the DD shows. His primary function is to make Kapil Dev and Mohinder Amarnath look like first-class intellectuals in contrast.(When that ploy failed they hired Mandira Bedi and a dysfunctional wardrobe for additional distraction)

Now Kris is diversifying. Here he is stating the obvious in his blog in his inimitable style. Hats off to his knack for the mot juste and his usage of just the right adjective to bring out the subtle differences in meaning; notice the usage of "ordinary", "very ordinary" and "very very ordinary".

Whats next for Kris? A column in hindi? That should be fun!

I.S

Buana : "Charlie, what the hell happened there?"
Charles: "What? Where?"
Buana: "Come'on, you know it! You were hitting on I.S."
Charles: (with a sheepish grin) "So were you"
Buana: "But you are just back from your honeymoon. Up to a year after my wedding, I wouldn't have noticed if Helen of Troy walked past me naked"
Charles: "In my case I've been living with my girlfriend for 6 years. The only thing that changed after the wedding was that we can now interchange our cars and the insurance will still be valid"
D: (tongue in cheek) "You better be careful though! You have a lawyer-wife"
Charles: (points to the parapet on which they are sitting) "I tell you its the wailing wall; It brings out the worst in me. By the way, she seemed to be interested in you D. She went overboard to accomodate you in the conversation. Did you notice she answered all the dutch questions in English?"
D: "Now don't shift the spotlight. The topic is still Charles' shallowness. You seemed rather interested in the African girls too at lunch today."
Bauna: "Charlie has no chance with the African girls. The Wildebeest has them in his sights. But Isabel..."
Charles: "Come off it guys. Didn't you see all the other guys that were congregating around her? Face it fellas, women control us. Forget all that shit about penis-envy and them being being the weaker sex" (winks)
D: "I always knew it. Sigmund de FRAUD"

From a dog-eared page

It’s hard to point out my first memory of Kaushik, but I remember as kids in middle school, we were in a gang of inseparable buddies. We played a lot of hockey in our garden and while buDDha, dead-racket and the others would jump over the compound and run home as soon as they spotted my dad, Kaushik would stay and talk to him.

By the time we were in high school, though, we had chosen different friend circles. I fit in somewhere midway between the bullies and the nerds in the hierarchy. I had my own bunnies- Peshi (short for Patient) for instance, I had a patented process to darken one eye of his photo-sensitive glasses by keeping it in the sun while covering the other, so that he looked completely silly during the first period after lunch. But for the most part I was a semi-nerd who managed decent grades. Kaushik on the other hand had graduated into a porn-peddling, cigarette-smoking alpha male who could look an angry PT master in the eye. Yet in defiance of the rules of the peck order we still hung out a lot together, especially outside school hours, although I had to pretend that his old nick name ‘cow-shit’ never existed. We had a weird sort of equation. If I fouled him in a football match, he would make sure I fell atleast twice in that game and then would not talk to me for a couple of days, but things always returned to normal.

He just about scraped through high school, but in PU he underwent a metamorphosis that has us friends still discussing it with disbelief. While in school he had parasited on my help just before each of the exams, here he started outscoring me. He started fitting into my world better. I still remember that Charit, Kaushik and I won a maths quiz in PU, and with the 60Rs we won, we watched Timecop from the balcony and ate what was my first ever Hot Chocolate Fudge. That was a far cry from school, where he would have killed himself before being spotted anywhere close to the quiz club. The three of us took great pleasure in aggravating our tuition teacher who hated us simply because we were from St.Joseph’s. Yet, the one really common thing between us was our craze for cycling.

In the long break after CET and before our engineering classes started, we went on long cycling trips. I remember one particular 100 km trip that had me and the rest of the gang swearing we'd never touch our cycles again. Yet after the fatigue wore off, we were left with some strange sense of accomplishment that we both identified with; like we had just proved something really important to someone really consequential, and we were already planning the next one.

In engineering he seemed to regress to the bad kid that he was in school. He came down from Mysore once every month or so, and the conversations we had were all about his macho lifestyle dominated by his two favourite topics, booze and his bike. By the end of the fourth year we had drifted apart.

I have no doubt in my mind that he was stone drunk when he crashed his Yezdi into a pillar that July night. The accident killed him instantly.

He would have turned 27 today.

Astrology

I saw this ad for an sms horoscope service that tells you what you can expect for the day, for a modest price of 70 cents. Three years ago I would have spewed venom at the kind of people who would spend 37 Rs for a shitty generalisation! But recently I have grown a tolerance towards astrology for the following reasons...
1. A knowledge of the zodiac signs is important (almost as important as reading the Da Vinci code) to be socially accepted in youth circles of 21st century urban India. In fact, my ignorance in that respect, I think, is an important factor in my embarassingly low success rate with the oppoite sex.
2. Star Signs, someone once told me, are a good way to remember peoples' birthdays.
3. They are also important conversation and ice-breaking tools. This was my first conversation with P..
P: Hi. When's your birthday?
Me: September 8th
P: Oh you are a virgo? I HATE virgos!!
Me: (the blank look that usually accompanies moments when crisp retorts desert you)
4. Most importantly I believe astrology is a great art! No, I don't believe that the stars actually influence our lives, but I have great respect for people who can cut the world's population into 12 equal parts and compose drivel that makes each of the 6 billion people go 'Its SO true'. It's not easy! My mom and her twin were born just 2 minutes apart (btw, its their birthday today. happy 50th, ladies!) and I can't think of ONE common thing between them except that they are both flat-footed. On the other hand, Linda Goodman can write hundreds of pages accurately describing you (and the 499,999,999 other people that you share your zodiac sign with) simply based on the month you were born. That's rhetoric genius! They just seem to instictively know exactly what you want to hear. Notice how even the 'criticism' is designed to tug at your vanity, "Your perfectionist instincts can annoy people" or "You can hurt people with your brutal frankness". See that's smart! Show me a person who doesn't think he/she is frank and I'll show you a man who thinks he is NOT a good driver! And then there are things that seem like criticisms but are actually not-so-thinly-veiled compliments, like "You are an underachiever". Brilliant! Even Larry Page I'm sure believes he can achieve more. Remember even Oskar Schindler was dissatisifed that he saved only a thousand lives.
In the end, maybe the 70 cents is money well spent after all. Or maybe not. Ah hell! I can't decide. Indecisiveness - that's so typical Virgo!

When the levee breaks...

...by Led Zeppelin has to be the song that I've been in love with for the longest period of time. And I can't think of another cover that sounded SO MUCH better than the original.

Here's some interesting trivia about the song from a Wikipedia page that explains why this song sounds so different from anything else.

"The famous drum performance was actually recorded by placing the drumkit and drummer at the bottom of a stairwell at Headley Grange, and recording it using a microphone three stories above, giving the distinctive resonant but slightly muffled sound. "

"Jimmy Page recorded the harmonica part using the backward echo technique, putting the echo ahead of the sound when mixing, creating a unique effect."

BengaLooru

A lot has been written about what's really behind this renaming craze and I really have nothing new to add. Nevertheless, it gives me an excuse to do my bit of whining.

I admit I could be seeing it through hazy eyes, but Bangalore, as I remember was still a lazy quaint old town where it rained a lot but never seemed to bother us as much as it does now, and you could buy a kid a bicycle without halving his chances of reaching adulthood and traffic jams were things that happened on Mysore road. There were still trees on either side of most roads. I remember that when I was a kid and my folks had to go out, there was always some house in the street that I could WALK into. Everybody spoke Kannada, although even back then less than half of the bangaloreans had Kannada as their mother tongue. The anglo-indian teachers in my school spoke chaste, if a little accented, Kannada. Even in my engineering class, save a couple of girls who claimed that they didn't understand Kannada, this is was our unofficial language.

Fast forward a few years and the picture is breathtakingly different. I haven’t made eye contact with my neighbours let alone smile or talk to them. Seven years separate my sister and me, and all she speaks in her class is a weird form of English with Hindi constructs thrown in liberally. "Vaise, as I was saying ki the movie is jhakaas...". Even the clerk at coffee day, who has Gowribidanur written all over his face, won't condescend to speak his own tongue.

So you have a Bangalore that is polarized into two groups. On the one hand you have the localites who can’t get over the nostalgia constipation, and in fairness are probably getting a little too xenophobic. We feel such a threat to our identity that we have to resort to bullying (like having the boards on the buses only in kannada or proposing a name that’s hard for the foreign tongue to pronounce) to get noticed. The less assertive folks like my parents have disowned this city and are looking forward to settling down in a place like Mysore. On the other hand you have the new arrivals who can’t seem to garner more respect for this city than they would for a brothel. “Let me be done with what I came here for and get out fast” seems to be the prevailing sentiment. Not that I suffer from any parochial angst, but just as a small display of their willingness to integrate, I would like to see a few more people going beyond the standard vocabulary that includes not more than 10 words (and that’s counting 'talk maadi' and 'drive maadi' as two separate verbs. I've even heard one dodo say 'do maadi').

And residing over the chaotic divisions is a sloth, the Chief Thief who was born without a neck and a brain, and is now puppeteered by another a**hole who looks exactly like a raagi mudde. Between them, they’ll have us believe that greater than all the problems we face here, is the crusade that they are trying to gear up support for. Bangalore or BengaLooru? Who the f*** cares!

2006

Happy new year to all the readers. I mean to both of you ;-)


Must say my new year's eve was pretty eventful. I planned to 'warm up' for the evening with what has become an obsession to me these days, ice-skating. The plan went tragically wrong when I fell into a little puddle at the edge of the rink and got my already inadequate winter clothing wet. I was trying the dangerous and difficult maneouver, stopping! Spent the next couple of hours next to a metal basket of hot coal while watching amateur bands play some rock music. Just before midnight I went to the banks of the river Schelde to witness the famous fireworks. While waiting for the fireworks to begin, I spent a dangerously pensive half hour resisting the urge to retrospect on a confusing past year. Instead I distracted myself with thoughts on issues that really mattered in the cosmic scheme of things (like will my shivering stop? Will I make it home alive?). Funnily amidst the sea of humanity (tens of thousands of people had gathered there) and in the middle of the spectacular fireworks that had even the most pathetically drunk folks in the crowd completely captivated, I had my first ever attack of home-sickness. In the few minutes that it lasted, I suddenly wanted to be in bangalore, even if it meant to stay at home and watch the stupid new year specials on Zee TV with the folks. A conclusive proof of the home-sickness was that I accosted a bunch of desis that I saw at the place and made conversation.Watched some figure-skating displays before getting back home. The journey was slowed down by the crowds that poured out of the pubs and eagerly wished everybody a 'gelukkig nieuw jaar' ( atleast the ones that didn't collapse on the pavements). And in what is turning out to be a creepy ritual; I spent my first few minutes at home almost devotionally attached to my room heater till my blood thawed. I desperately need to do some shopping!

some pictures.

Looking back - 1

One of my resolutions for 2005 was to learn a new language. German is not exactly the sweetest tongue around. And lets face it, the people associated with the language haven't been the best accumulators of good press! But still, having mastered a full sentence in German - "umsteigen Züge linien sieben und dreißig..." that I picked from the tram announcer in Vienna- it was my natural choice.

My first impression from the class was the realisation that I had finally reached a stage in life when my teachers are going to be younger than me. And it took a couple of weeks to not get startled by the harshness of the language. Gesundheit sounded like I was being reprimanded for sneezing. And try saying 'Feuerschutztür' without sounding rude and without getting some spittle out. But later, it turned out to be a fantastic four months, although in the end we went only as far as to be able to order a salami sandwich with cheese in it (and even that little knowledge is getting displaced by the flemish that I'm trying to learn here). Learning the language turned out to be a great pretext to satisfy my need to have a few non-engineer friends; this bunch at the class was a great mix, a doctor, a jeweller, students, an artist, a pub-keeper-turned-salesman etc. Despite the forbiddingly complicated grammar, learning the language itself had its kick too. I picked up a fetish to form big words: Lieblingstischtennisspielerinnen (favourite female table tennis player) is one word! And Deutsch has some wonderfully expressive words; Weltschmerz, Zeitgeist, Wanderlust and my favourite of all, Schadenfreude (who else but the Germans could come up with both the word and the idea!;-) ). My best memories were all from outside class though; classic rock in Vishal's den, Kunal's psychological warfare while playing Pictionary over beer and then the rain-trek at coorg and later Pictonary over kichdi at Ankura's, the Bangalorean vs Ausländer duels, watching Satya lose her mind and laugh hysterically after a glass of wine and the farewell Sangrias.

Christmas in Amsterdam

Dames en Heren,welkom in Amsterdam. It don't matter whether you are a nerdy artsy-fartsy soul looking to unravel the works of the impressionist masters or just a loose cannon intent on debauchery or anyone in between. There's something here for everyone. Some pictures.

Counsellors

You get the best advice from psychos, most often for the price of a rasagulla.

This week, psychos of another kind contributed too on a theme that had bothered me; the following are from the 'Pool Guy' episode from Seinfeld

"This world here, this is George's sanctuary. If Susan comes into contact with this world, his worlds collide!"
- Kramer

"You have no idea of the magnitude of this thing. If she is allowed to infiltrate this world then George Costanza as you know him ceases to exist. You see, right now I have Relationship George. But there is also Independent George. That's the George you know, the George you grew up with... Movie George, Coffee Shop George, Liar George, Bawdy George."
"I love that George."
"Me too, and he's dying. If Relationship George walks through this door, he will kill Independent George. A George divided against itself cannot stand!"
- George and Jerry

Post aphees post

(Soliloquy in paranthesis)
"Oh we had a tough time in Mumbai"
"yeah?"
"We went to the central post office to send a postcard to the family and that place didn't have postcards! Strange, no?"
"naah not to me. That's the first thing we are taught at school. [In kindergarten-school-teacher-falsetto] Children, don't expect postcards in the post office"
frown!
"(you could laugh for courtesy)"
"And they don't even sell envelopes!"
"hmm"
"And we finally found some envelopes at a Tabak shop. If a 4ftx4ft shop can stock envelopes then surely the post office can too!"
"haha hmm"
"Atleast they sell stamps in the post office, but guess what?"
"(judging by the gravity on your face your modesty got outraged by a burly postal worker!) hmmm?"
"You can't just lick the back of the stamps to paste them. You have to use glue"
"hmmm (yawn)"
"And then I had to spread the glue with my finger and I made a mess of the envelope and my hands! It was crazy"
"hmmm"
"I mean there are two hundred people working there and not one of them bothered to help us"
"Hey who do you think is greater, Eddie Merckx or Lance Armstrong?"
"Oh don't believe the Americans; they'll tell you anything!!!"
"(phew)"

Stad fest

So what if I later shivered like a plucked chicken in antarctica? So what if I was the only dud over 12 who kept falling with splayed legs? So what if my butt and my forearms still hurt ? So what if I wasn''t exactly a male Tara Lipinski?
Ice skating is awesome fun and I'm completely hooked.

All the christmas festivities in Antwerp have been super fun. Except when they start to play 'Last Christmas' by Wham! On top of being a bad song it's a determined uhrwurm sticking like a piece of stray cellophane. I found myself humming it till I got all itchy with irritation. People!!!! That song has nothing to do with Jesus, Bethlehem, the magi or anything remotely connected to them. It has nothing do with christmas except for the small incidental detail that a gay man gave his heart to someone on december 25th and he/she duly returned it the very next day! Stop playing it!!!!!

Zapping

I don't exactly have an embarassment of riches when it comes to the programmes that I get on my TV. It's another case of this is all you get, learn to like it, sorta like Pathak's pickles!
Some observations from Saturday evening:

Channel 2:
Watching ER, and I'm thoroughly irritated by the most wordy, proficient and vain bunch of medical professionals ever. While the camera swivels around the patient, the doctors and the nurses do their prognosis in the one-person-one-sentence style. '3rd degree burns on the lycopersicum esculentum' starts the guy facing the camera. The protocol demands that the one standing next to the last speaker say something now. With all the due consideration for the cameraman, they make sure they never speak out of turn. So without a moment's pause, the woman next to the first speaker says 'Patient has history of ephemerolsis. Check before administering pisum sativum'. next! 'Patient visibly impressed by our medical vocabularies.Keep this going'.

NGC:
Did you know that 'Big Foot Historian' and 'Crop circle artist' are ACTUAL professions?

JIM TV:
This channel specialises in reality shows and cheesy countdowns, like 101 shocking moments and 101 hottest Celebrity gossip. Yesterday I got to watch 101 Celebrity oops! If I thought Big Foot Historian is a weird profession, the ensemble of this programme made me rethink. There are people here who specialise in remembering that Jennifer Aniston didn't thank her husband Brad Pitt in one of her award acceptance speeches, and then they succinctly express their own scholarly views on the gaffe 'I was like OH...MY...GOD! '
And later there was the top ten police chases, everyone of which looked like every other. I was impressed, though, by the sense of fairness that the cops in America display. They know that there's just one guy in the car they are chasing, they know he is driving like a maniac breaking all traffic rules, they know they'll kick his butt when they catch him, but they still insist on calling him a SUSPECT!

TMF:
The music channel. The top of the charts features a lady outraged by the fact that her butt attracts so much attention , in a song aptly titled 'My Humps'. Most of the other songs are by rap artists ashamed of their real names.

VT4:
The playmate took a small break from relentlessly kissing Hugh Hefner's ass (figuratively of course!) to say this 'My two (yeah she said 2) favourite Fs on the fourth of july are food , fireworks and f*****'. One of the lesser kicks that Hefner must surely get out of the company he keeps is to feel like Mensa material.

Saturday

11:00
I am refreshing the cricinfo page twice every 10 seconds and following a test match. Find a lousier loser.

12:00
Completely captivated by the single-lonely-guy-in-far-off-city narrative of ‘Sophie’s Choice’. Take away the sex life and the literary pretensions of Stingo , the protagonist, and it could be ME telling the story.

3:00 PM
Even in the bitter cold, a trip down the Meir can be quite rewarding. Amateur musicians play on the streets on the weekends and holidays. It’s like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.(bad analogy)
There is a two-member band playing swing and boogie woogie tunes. One guy is playing the piano, an unusual instrument for a street musician. The other guy is playing percussion on an instrument that is evidently a one-of-its-kind, fabricated from kitchen utensils. It seems to be made of a kitchen grate with a cymbal attached to it (or it could very well have been a plain brass plate). He is playing it with an egg-beater in one hand and a spoon in the other. And they are making some unbelievable music. They are having so much fun in the process that by the end of their short concert I’m jealous of them. A part of me is completely sold on the romanticism of living out of the box, and the other part is depressed about my own undistinguished existence and woeful lack of talents. Despite that, I put money into the old hat.

8:00 PM
Momentary break from social death. I am the curio in the middle of a crowd of Caucasians at a colleague's birthday party. I am initially conscious and everytime they switch to dutch I feel they are making fun of me. But it’s great fun. And conversation is easy if you are an Indian guy. These phirangs can never have enough of the We-have-more-gods-and-languages-than-people and The-red-traffic-light-is-just-a-recommendation stories, although I lose them when I attempt to explain cricket. And they confound me with how seriously they take their alcohol.

3:00 AM the next day
On the way back home I’m reminded of how grossly inadequate my winter clothes are. I lean against the room heater for half an hour before going to bed.

Thanks MS

I read a post that made me check the Kumbh Mela register to see if they have a record for some brother who got separated from me. I believe its not plagiarism if you credit the author. The first paragraph is completely from the original post. To quote the hateful platitude that most software engineers and MBA aspirants seem to love, 'Why reinvent the wheel?'. But the latter one is original :-)

I hate Harry Potter. For no particular reason. I am very bad at taking compliments. Not that many come my way. On MOST days, I like Seinfeld better than Friends. I wear thin jackets even in freezing cold. Pain is good. I feel like a complete idiot when people discuss taxes or stocks. I prefer coffee to tea, 99 times to 1. I love long hair. I talk less when I am on a high. I love heights. I cannot speak in any other language once I have established a rapport with someone in a certain language. I am judgmental about people based on their linguistic origin. Sometimes I feel that I have been there and done that than most people I know. Sometimes its the other way round. I can listen to music twentyfourhoursaday sevendaysaweek threesixtyfivedaysoftheyear. I'd like to imagine movie scenes no one has ever attempted, like riding a car in a mall. After I heard that, in some of the African countries where there is a dictatorship rule, you can get killed for walking on the wrong side of the street, I have a strong urge to visit that place. I am psyched everytime I pack my suitcases for it may exceed the weight limit. I prefer to ride or walk in the rain than to wait in a shelter. For a long time, I used to think riding auto rickshaws was a sissy thing to do. As much as I hate to admit it, I am biased towards people who have strong command over English. I hate people who have good command over English but fashionably speak bad. After staying with parents and alone, I do not know which I prefer. 95% of the bloggers I know or read of give me an indication that they invariably have an ex. Everyday I figure out that there is so much I don't know. Everyday I realize that there is nothing left that I don't know. I'd like to believe the last two sentences were profound. It's crap. I do atleast one different thing every six months. I never go back and check the prices of any of the electronic goods that I have bought. There are two kinds of people in this world, one who follow their hearts and one who follow their minds. Only my close friends can correctly guess which category I fall into.Jax, you inspired me to blog.

I hate the words Obviously and Basically. They mean nothing to me. Till I was in 10th standard, I used to do the bowling action without a ball in my hand atleast 25 times a day.I don't have the guts to speak Hindi, to dance, or to sing in public. Greeting card verses make me sick. I almost never get angry these days. My muthodi-mates and another friend will never believe that. I am attracted to people who have a short temper. I wish I was articulate enough to express the genius I noticed in the 93 pages of Ulysses I read. Silences during phone conversations make me nervous as hell. I always feel guilty about reimbursing pizza bills at office. I don't believe Freud.I have a prejudice against people who read the Financial times or technical journals. In a weirdly masochistic way I enjoyed the depression that 1984 (the book), and most holocaust material I have read gave me. I keep thinking of alternate careers despite being aware of my lack of talents. I am fascinated by how easily you can get away with silliness when writing lyrics in Hindi. ('Diye jalte hai, phool khilte hai' for god's sake!!!) Honesty is overrated. I love spiral staircases. I hate people who don't admit that they turned engineers or doctors because they didn't know what else to do. I wonder why it's so difficult to convince a girl that women's cricket is crap without making them conclude that I am an MCP.I also believe that they should ban male bharathnatyam dancers and synchronised swimmers. When hanging out with groups I always notice that there are a just a handful of people who always end up paying the bill most of the time. It took me 26 years to be comfortable with the knowledge that there will be a few people who will hate me. I pick the most boring gifts. I have so many regrets. The first time I saw the opera scene in Philadelphia I was uncomfortable and I still can't believe they gave all those oscars to Titanic. I must go now.

The dirty linen

How did people ever manage without the internet?

When I wanted to learn how to best use the laudromat, I turned to the internet and sure enough, there was all the information that I needed. I read the important bits a couple of times and feeling sufficiently well-equipped went to the one in the neighbourhood. Unfortunately, every written word there was in dutch! So here's the updated procedure. If you are a dutch-ignorant expat in the Vlanderen region of Belgium, Holland, Surinam or South Africa here's what you should ;
1. Go to the Laundromat
2. Call up Hans and do exactly what he tells you to do.

But seriously, I'm now an expert on the Belgian laundromat scene. That coming just a week after I mastered the art of making chapathis. Life in the recent past has been a string of new experiences. Mostly pleasant, but all this cooking and washing; THAT I frankly was better off not knowing. Some day, from the vantage point of retrospect, I bet I'll look back at this, flash one of those dumb smiles that go well with nostalgia, and talk about how wonderful this was. I'm sure I'll bore my kids with hackneyed stories that illustrate the character building nature of these experiences. But right now, its just a pain in the butt

The day the music died

I kept dreading the little gesture that shouts out to me ‘You have overstayed’, and I think I got it. Here’s a post to commemorate my expiry date. I want to compose prose that captures all and reveals nothing. As I get over moaning and self-pitying and puncturing the voodoo doll with all the needles it can take, I realise that these few weeks will still remain the summer (the phirang’s metaphor for a good time, not the scorching Indian season). The memories are a solace while I grapple with a workload of a million questions per minute; 'Was I wronged by a higher truth, screwed by the sabziwalla or dragged by destiny?'. How can I be SO glad to be alone this moment but hate it the very next? I realise the futility of finding answers for these no-gooders, I know I'll be left with nothing but the sweet taste of the supreme compliment. My second favourite was 'I love the way you manually defog the windows'. Other worthy contenders for that spot were 'You are dumb', 'You are a phoney bastard' and 'Rip van Uncle'.

Background score for the moment – Thank You by Alanis Morisette

23rd

I was tagged by L*J (with the right fonts you can get a cool symmetry with thy blog-name) to do this

Delve into my blog archive
Find your 23rd post (or closest to)
Find the fifth sentence (or closest to)
Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions
Tag five people to do the same

Here goes:
"He puts his GRE vocabulary to active use. As a result you're likely to catch him using for instance,the word 'obviate' in informal conversations, and he is more likely to 'opine' than to just say!"

Jax and traaks, take the batons.

Boat

Hans is the self proclaimed master of oriental names. His claim to fame is that he can remember the names of all the members of some half dozen Japanese heavy metal bands. There is a story that he brought tears to the eyes of one of the band members when he recited all their names. I had to believe him when he pronounced correctly the 'Na' sound in Kannada (as in gaNesha). Even he had trouble pronouncing the name of my new Thai colleague, without getting his tongue into a double reef knot. I remembered that he had introduced himself with a most disarming smile "Hi I am Jabberwocky Ectoplasm Thingamajig***,” (What the…) ” but you can call me Boat" (Phew).
Boat; the most fidgety guy I have met. He is technically brilliant for his age, but to converse with him can be exasperating. For every word he utters, he shrugs his shoulder once, winks a couple of times, and moves his hand around in the most unpredictable ways. And in between words too his mouth is constantly moving; it’s like watching a badly dubbed Hong Kong movie. And to compound the problem, he is yet to master some very important consonants. The other day he told me "Lion is a bad man". Only 10 minutes, and a lot of clues later, I realised he was talking about Ryan. He is also the single biggest reason for many of our meetings getting delayed. This is how he told us that the system crashed on the fourth day (For reasons of brevity, the pauses and the fidgeting have been edited);
" first day....'tsok"
" second day ...'tsok"
" third day .... 'tsok"
"But....." longer pause, while he twitched all the muscles he could control, and the mood on his face changed from glad to sadness."...fourth day..." Oh the tension was killing us. "Not ok" !!!!!




*** Name changed to preserve anonymity. Real name available on request; well, as soon as the author learns it himself.

When in Rome, do the Romans

I’ve been a month here and I'm feeling at home now.
- I no longer stare at the orthodox Jews on Belgielei and wonder 'They still live like this???'.
- I sleep in the train without the fear of missing my station.
- The Bangladeshi surfing centre guy flashes me a big smile every time I walk past his shop. (Although the Tamilian lady next door starts scanning the ground when she senses my presence).
- I can differentiate between Dutch, German and French. I can speak a few sentences in Flemish too.
- I can strategically time to millisecond accuracy my visits to my desi friends here so that I get invited for meals.
- The Gujju guy at the night shop spits out his paan to talk to me. I find that very flattering.
- My biological clock seems to be already in tune with the seasons here. At least my scalp seems to be responding to the mysterious stimuli of the fall season, evident from post-shower analyses of the bathroom sieve.
- I like waffles.
- But I realised I was really blending in; when I realised I was subconsciously doing the 'Belgian pout'. A couple of weeks ago Fran asked me what I think is the most peculiar thing I noticed in Belgium. At that time I had no answer but if she asks me again I have to say it is the Belgian Pout. It’s the Belgian equivalent of the famous Ambiguous Indian Head Shake. This is how you do it; you purse your lips to form the smallest circle possible, lift your eyebrows, nod your head a couple of times and optionally let out an unsure 'yeah' (of course, it wont sound like a 'yeah' because you've rounded your lips!!). When done correctly it literally translates to 'I don’t see why not!’.

Prog-nose

It was the International Progressive Rock Festival at Antwerp!

International?
yeah right! The only thing international about it was that there was an indian guy in the audience.

Progressive?
When we arrived there the show had begun and an amateur band was playing. There was nothing progressive about the hairy guy grunting and growling into the microphone. If anything, he had regressed a couple of rungs down the evolutionary ladder.

Festival?
A little too pompous a word to describe an event that had an audience of 150 people, I thought!

The first couple of bands that played were the typical wannabes. A guitarist so obsessed with growing his hair long, and moving his fingers as fast as he could on the fret board, that he forgot that music is supposed to sound nice. A lyricist who strung together profound sounding random phrases and a singer who was throating those words like he had a grudge against everybody in the world. After we had suffered the first couple of bands,though, things looked up. There was some really good music played. And the last band Riverside actually were good enough to do a fake exit!

The highlight of the evening, though, has to be meeting Christoph. Now I know both the King Crimson fans in the world. Beat that!

My last moult

Atlast I flew out of my nest. A little late, at 27 years, but it finally happened. I was going to taste freedom, expand my horizons and seek my fortunes as a citizen of the world. Now in the middle of the second weekend in MY own house I realised that all the exalted ideas of spreading your wings comes with a lot of fine print; washing, vacuuming, cleaning and cooking; and worse, eating the crap that you cooked too!

Naaaaah its not bad at all. I'm just a few books and an internet connection short of eden... and maybe a couple of friends, and a bicycle, and a pair of dancing eyes, and a few classic rock CDs, and....

Some photos from Antwerp. and my home

AC ducts on the floor?

We walked into the old dilapidated building that looked like a hideout for the mafia. Rudi with his shaven head, shades and the suitcase actually looked like a henchman here to fix an underworld deal. The first floor was completely empty. The walls did have some kind of ledge space where there were lots of motionless pigeons. When I strained my eyes I could see that most of them were dead. The others seemed to be in mourning. We had to get to the fourth floor. We reached the lift and there was something scrawled in Flemish. 'Lift is unreliable, take the stairs' Hans translated it for me. The staircase, in its glory days (sometime around the second world war) must have been a fire exit. The second floor was empty too. The third floor, I was told, had been a cigarette factory sometime back and it still reeked of tobacco. The fourth floor door opened to a long passageway with a huge AC duct right on the floor. There were rooms on either side and all of them had their doors ajar to let in the smaller ac ducts. All these little ductlets were blowing air into the rooms and were flaying about like tentacles, you know due to Newtons third law and all. The room that we had to go to was at the end of the passage. There the tentacle was subdued by two cans of water. We had to step over them and get into the place. We had entered the server room of Mobistar, Belgium's second largest mobile operator. I should have believed them when they told me Belgium is a weird place.

Mushy tales

"...one of the most important developments of our times" - New York times
"hahahahhah" - Washington tribune

I picked up the weapon of choice; a triple-blade Gilette mach-3 and stood in front of the mirror for a long long time. Fighting all the voices that kept telling me not to do it. I thought of Gaga; it was a much bigger deal for him-being a sardar- to shave off his hair and beard. What was stopping me? I then rememebered the kid who had laughed when I pecked her on the cheek because the bristles tickled her. That was enough; in six or seven swipes I had shaved off my moustache. Jax was right! It was a liberating feeling. I felt empowered. I had left orthodoxy behind. Felt like I had entered a new world. The man in the mirror hardly looked like a man but I knew this was one small step for a man but a ...I really should stop making a big deal out of these little things. Raskolnikov must have given less thought about chopping off a human being!!!!!

Auf Wiedersehn

It was my last day in the office and BigBoss hosted a special lunch. Lots of people were fascinated that I might have to go to Africa. Almost everyone made me promise to send them snaps, although I got the feeling that their expectations were a little unfair! Me in anything less than the traditional Masai clothes hunting wildebeest in Serengetti is bound to disappoint them! Shrek assured me with a wily twisted grin that my gopikas were in safe hands, his. The best part was when the buck passed around and people had to give their parting thoughts. Snake, Yotka, God ,the boss and even the Sub-woofer, all said some really sweet things about me but the sad part is that I'll remember the words of two guys who matter the least. The joker, in probably the longest sentence he has composed, said "Deepaka? he is also wokay". Now since I'm familiar with joker's legendary lack of communication skills, I'm used to his economy of words, but the 'Also' really intrigued me. I asked him who else he was talking about. In typical fashion he grinned wide but chose not to answer. And Thorn said something that brought me crashing so hard it still hurts; he said "I've not known him for long but I can tell he is a typical mallu". HUH???? How is that a compliment to ANYBODY??????

There's a golden rule about farewells. After an emotional goodbye, the fareweller and the farewellee should to stay out of sight for a while, otherwise it embarasses all parties involved and dilutes the whole experience. I violated this rule! Suddenly people stopped taking me seriously. I realised this when, the day before ACTUALLY leaving, I was there (again!!) at office and Banshee gave me the most casual 'See you tomorrow!'!

But, in the end it wasn't a bad stopover. Had the pleasure of working under the two best bosses I've had, made a few friends, some that I'll really really miss. Not a bad job in a year methinks!

The maul

Gopi is your average homophobic joe. He's never been the same confident male ever since bobbyhead violated his holy zone. You know the holy zone; the imaginary circle drawn with Gopi as the centre and x as the radius, where x is equal to the distance between the ATM and the yellow line that says "Await your turn here". Bobbyhead didn't just stop at that; he took Gopis hands one each in his own, held them for an eternity (about 1.5 seconds), and then tried to do the intertwined-fingers-clasp. Gopi who was shaking and blushing was preoccupied with finding out if anybody saw it. As soon as he recovered his senses, he snapped into action. In one swift move he took back his hands put them into his pockets and ran. We're guessing his interim appraisal is screwed. What's worse, the committee will never take this seriously.

It's too late

I've come far enough from those stormy months to now look back and say "Well!". The important thing is not that I said "Well" but that I can look BACK on it. No longer is the world divided into two halves; one half that atleast heard me out, and the other overwhelmingly bigger half that gave me funny tags to carry. Clarity has returned. I know I'm not guilty of every charge they threw at me. I now know exactly what crimes I'm guilty of and that's a liberating feeling. I no longer sit up at 3 AM to fight the moral dilemmas that a world fascinated by happy endings was throwing at me. And I no longer cringe at the thought of that dreadful one "It's too late". Nope, It wasn't. The handful of people for whom I wasn't just a social correctness crash test dummy, I owe a lot. I know a couple of you are going to read this and this is my Danke. Rasagullas will follow. :-)

Cheers in heaven

To one of the most underrated joys. To falling in love with a song. When listening to it makes you feel like everything else is irrelevant.
This morning I fell in love with the unpretentiousness of Janis Joplin's voice in Bobby McGee.

We must be the homesickest race!

The guy gives me a stare that I can understand. It’s a loaded stare; it is saying “You are Indian, I am Indian. We should socialize.” My response is to bury my head deeper into my laptop, put on a well rehearsed frown and respond with a look that says “There are a billion other Indians. Go find someone else”. The guy looks like he can solve a 4th order quadratic equation mentally, but obviously taking a hint is not one of his strong points. He approaches me and gives me the standard opener “Bangalore?”. Do you think so? Indian guy with a laptop- What are the odds? It’s time to check in and we stand in the queue together. So I begin reconciling with my destiny. I will be stuck with this guy for the rest of the flight discussing how Cisco’s IP strategy completely destroyed ATM technology. I reach the counter and the lady asks me “There’s just one seat left next to the emergency exit. Do you want it?”. I’ll take it ma’am. Emergency exit!!…ah There’s never a bad time for some humour.