1056 words

I like this little afterthought in which the quack realized at the end of his promo that he can cure brain problems too.

The anandrao circle newspapaperman

We bangaloreans are given to a lot of nostalgia constipation. We just cannot stop ranting about how Bangalore has changed so unrecognizably. As a consequence we really cling on to those few things that have remained constant. For instance, even the rudeness of the waiter at MTR makes us all emotional. One character who has stayed on unchanged continuously for at least the last 25 years is our newspaperman on Anandrao circle. He still insists on calling out the "breaking news" in his high-pitch excited voice. He has lost all his teeth and you can bearly understand his words, but he still manages to evoke curiosity. He's probably the last of his kind.

The 10 km run

Reading the Selfish Gene (and the Origins of Virtue after that) screws up the way you think, at least for a while. You stop participating in human experiences normally. Instead, now when you watch people do something, you step out and think what's making them do it? or What's the evolutionary advantage that this behaviour gave us as a species? So this morning while I was running the 10k event in bangalore, I was noticing that there were twice as many people facilitating this event as there were running. Even I did my altruistic bit by egging on the stragglers. There were people on the pavements who had come there just to cheer the runners. And I felt this overwhelming sense of bonhomie towards everybody; the runners, the cheerers, the organisers and even all the people inconvenienced by this event. I could see that everybody was experiencing that feeling too. And naturally, I am wondering what evolutionary plot is behind this feeling. I didn't get the answer but I managed to finish the race in 55 minutes, 5 minutes lesser than I had initially targeted. I felt incredibly proud, despite knowing that those absolutely gorgeous running machines that drop in from Kenya and Ethiopia and other godforsaken places run this stretch in roughly half that time. Anyway, one of the best things about running is the way you enjoy everything else you do immediately after that. The water down your throat never felt better, Masala Dosas were never more satisfying, and I don't even have words to describe the cold shower.

All in all, it felt great to be in that sea of humanity, coming together for a seemingly inane activity, but nevertheless feeling that warm fuzzy sense of togetherness. At the parking lot, trying to get our cars out of the almighty mess, though, we were all back to hating each other.

New folks

Like my last post revealed I'm having a lot of conversations, mostly with myself, about age in general, mine in particular. One of the reasons, I figured, is the amount of time I've spent with a couple of new sets of friends who are all from such diverse age groups. For example in the last week I've sat at the same table with A.jr, who is a decade younger then me and I've also had a drink with Chief, who is a full twenty years older than I am. It's striking how similar all these people are in their joie-de-vivre. On the one end I sat there admiring A for how well-adjusted, confident and comfortable she was in her skin and so un-overwhelmed by the new place and people and on the other I was in awe of the Chief for how much and how easily he smiled, and how meanly he bent his harmonica during that absolutely unforgettable virtuoso performance.

Marathon kit

There's something about turning thirty. I imagine this giant ominous odometer on which the units wheel goes from 9 to 0 goading the adjacent wheel to skip to the next numeral. Although I know 30 is just one more than 29, just like 29 was one more than 28, it just feels a lot more momentuous. There's suddenly more evaluations; "Is this where I wanted to be at this point in my life?" and "What next?". There is a lot of paranoia. A good indicator of that is the list I have of things I want to do before I turn thirty. Most of the things on that list are pretty cool and diverse but they all have something in common; they all reveal a fear of ageing and all of them have the theme of proving something to this youth-obsessed world. Item no. 14 was to run the half marathon. Since there's no half marathon happening in the near future, I settled for the 10k run that's happening tomorrow.

Yesterday I collected my marathon kit. Although I know I paid for more than what I got, I still can't stop getting excited about "freebies". The kit has some really useful things such as a water bottle, some biscuits and candy. But some things in that bag are bizarre. There is a packet of instant pasta. Ok, maybe pasta makes you fasta, but what's sugar-free doing there, robbing you of the carbs when you so badly need them? And most weird of all, there's a packet of chilli powder. R had the last word "I can think of 18 ways in which you can employ chilli powder to make ANYBODY run the full marathon!". Makes sense.

A little less...

I'm dead tired and ready to plunge into deep slumber if I as much as blink. I've driven half way around town, spent an eternity in the sun and managed to get a lot of work done; I've earned my rest. Yet I'm forcing myself awake. I'm rolling the memories from the day over my tongue one last time before I swallow them. Suddenly I remember two separate incidents from the day. In the morning I had almost driven past a left turn that I was supposed to take, realized it rather late and chose to give my wheel a tug and made that turn; the kind of turn that emits a screech and leaves a generous deposit of rubber on the road. I am now thinking of what could have been. There could have been pedestrians in the path. There could have been vehicles in my blindspot that I may have taken down. I am thinking of everything that could have gone wrong and my palms are sweating uncontrollably.

Another incident elicited a different kind of fear but very similar bodily reactions. RR asked me if I want to join his startup. I don't know the future there, I don't know the pay and I don't know the work so I gave him a courteous but phoney 'I'll give it a thought'. Now lying on my bed I'm actually giving it a thought and I can sense all my organs starting to malfunction.

I'm going to be awake for a long time now.

Another Hallmark Day

RJ: Good mornin' bengalooru. Happy Women's Day. On this day, exciting prices kodtha idheevi.
S: Write this down! Kannada won't make it to the next decade.
RJ: We've got our first caller on the line. Rekha, how are you doing today? Tell me, why do you think women are better than men?
Rekha: hmmm...
S: How about that we've never started a war? ever!
Rekha: hmmm...basically...uh
S: How about that we never install rear spoilers on our cars? ever!
Rekha: ... women are more flexible, responsible, creative and strong.
S: Fuck!
RJ: Wow! That's so true. You win yourself...
ZAP!
S: ... a gift voucher to a shop that'll sell you a misguided beauty ideal.

Recent Peeves

There are a lot of things about this world that make me raving mad, such as the fact that the Self Help Industry is a 6-billion-per-yr-growing-at-12% one. But ironically one of these self-help fundas instructed me to list down all the things that irritate me on any one arbitrary day and I decided to oblige. This exercise is supposed to illuminate me on my degrees of intolerance. So here's my list for one such average uneventful day.
* This guy is explaining to me the new house that he is building. I manage to overlook his excessive attention to detail and his over-the-top lifestyle obsession. He wants me to be impressed by his "achievements" and I play sport. However, I lose it when, for the second time, he pronounces the word Duplex like it's a french word "Dew-Play!". So I say "Oh Duplekkkss! that must be nice". He gets the hint but he is convinced that I'm uncultured and wrong. So he frames a completely contrived sentence with the sole intention of using the word so he can convey the correct pronunciation. I, for my part, forfeit the use of pronouns just to be able to use that word in another sentence. This exchange goes on for a couple more iterations and before things get too "Com-Play" and I do a quick pranayama and bail out.
* I'm not proud of this but file names with spaces irritate me.
* People who enter the lift before everybody has stepped out.
* And then there are things that not as much irritate me as make me lose faith in humanity, such as Dan Brown and Puneeth Rajkumar Fan Clubs, or worse still, the latest fad of sticking up gauche posters wishing pseudo celebrities a happy birthday. We, as a people, are not very well-known for our visual aesthetic sense- just look at our (Karnataka) flag if you need the proof- but these posters take gaudiness to a whole new level. Like the one wishing Rajnikanth a good day. The words go "There can be many suns and many moons but there can be only one star" and has a Rajni likeness covering most of the real estate on the poster. Wherever there are spaces, you have pictures of moustachioed men speaking on their mobile phones.
I'll post a picture soon.

Men Are From Halebid, Women Are From Belur

Adversities had beset us all morning. We had almost died from not having had breakfast. The roads, or their absence, had threatened to disintegrate the car. S, with her accented kannada, had almost taken us to the "Helipad" (YEAH! Hassan has a helipad!), but we finally made it to the temple on our way to Chikmagalur. The theme of the trip was set by a fairly casual and dreamy comment made by A about what traits she would like in her knight in shining armour. By the end of the third day we had decided that this gentleman needed to reconcile a lot of mutually exclusive characteristics. Someone who surpassed this creature in hodgpodgeness.

On the other hand, V (and I found myself nodding in immediate agreement) had a simpler set of expectations: nothing an average cosmetic surgeon couldn't furnish. Once again, the temple had the answer.
We did pay dearly for our shallowness. We were "objectified", evaluated and judged during the rest of the trip. That apart, I couldn't have asked for a better way to start the new year.

I need a road trip

Notice how different road trips in movies are from the ones you do in real life? There's no Shelter From the Storm playing in Dolby Surround and there's no fading of the sound track when the characters have something interesting to say. There are no long shots of the car from a helicopter. There are no deserted highways that stretch straight all the way to the horizon.

There's just a chaos of behind-the-canvas thoughts that you don't even realize you are thinking as you see a slideshow of people, towns, cattle, streetmeat and vehicles. Only the distant trees and the clouds indulge you by seeming to ride along with you reminding you that you are not really going as fast as you think you are. There is music playing whose only purpose seems to be to divide opinions in the car. There's the harsh wind rushing through the window and making exhaling difficult. There's the short moment of eye contact with the occupants of a passing vehicle when you make snap subconscious judgements at all of them. There are the pee breaks, usually meant not just to change the drivers but also the rhythm of the journey. And then there's arriving.

I want to go on a road trip.

"Spirituality" is looking at a Sequioa tree

I'm driving through a shrub jungle behind a huge pickup on a pleasant day. The road is winding and I'm alternating between concentrating on the turns and cursing the culture that has made driving big cars fashionable. While I'm still staring at the yellow pickup with disdainful eyes and casting sadistic curses on its driver, after one particularly wide curve, the car in front shrunk. That's the first thing I remember thinking when we entered the Sequioa forest. The second thing that I remember thinking is "There must be a god!" The trees are just awesome. They make you feel everything is right with the world. They make you wanna shut up forever. And after I got my atheism back, they looked most magnificient.

YES!

The Nobel Committee got it right, if you ask me. After goofing up so bad all these years, such as giving it to Arafat and not giving it to Gandhi, they finally found someone deserving.

I'm not really sure if global warming is man-made or just one of those not-so-well-understood cycles of nature. But even if Gore is proved wrong in the future I think he's done great service. He's made the guy who drives his Ford pickup to work look very uncool. He's undoubtedly raised consciousness. I think he has changed values. I know of at least one turd-brain who suddenly started being conscientious of how many plastic coffee cups he was using in a day after watching "An Inconvenient Truth" (no, there is nothing in that movie about coffee cups, but that's what is so heartening).

I still believe that we are on course for inevitable destruction. I think we will lose the remaining forest cover (which in India is a pathetic 4%) and the remaining tigers (1200 or so, if you do an honest count) before I have grandkids. I also believe that we will, in my lifetime, turn this planet into, to borrow George Carlin's words, a coast-to-coast shopping mall. I'll return to being depressed later. For now, I just hope Gore will do more of his stunts.

P's Wedding

D: Hey buddy. How was the wedding?

P: I assembled hundreds of people who couldn't stand each other to begin with. Then I increased their chances of bumping into one another every second minute by putting them all in a room for which I paid a bomb. The collective irritability was just not enough at this point, so I deprived everybody of sleep and I then filled the room with smoke and really bad music, besides hiring an illiterate to mouth sweet nothings and to be our boss for 2 days. How do you guess it went?

Chuck Norris

This is hilarious
http://www.dahl-lumholt.dk/Chuck-Norris.html?index

Replace "Chuck Norris" with "Rajnikanth" and all the jokes continue to work

Guten tag

"How old should you get before you stop doing tags?" - Old jungle rhetorical question.

I started off being passionately anti-tag, but now my views are slightly more charitable towards them because I keep hitting the dead ends when I realise I have nothing else to write about and these tags give me a good excuse to get self-obsessed once again.

1. Pick out a scar you have, and explain how yu got it

This is a story from way back when Basketball was our religion. Pups, one of the important apostles, always advised me that I ran towards the basket too fast ; in his words "like an ape with his tail on fire". I took that as a compliment till I got the scar that I'm going to tell you about. It was our usual afternoon game. I had run past two guys, completed a layup and released the ball like everything was scripted. Things went wrong before I could land on the ground. Keermam shoved me hard while i was still in the air, I lost my balance and my landing was screwed up by some other stray foot. I went tumbling several feet beyond where I should have stopped. And then I heard the loud bang and saw the bright light at the same time. A few seconds later I even tasted that mysterious metal taste that appears at the back of the tongue when you injure your head. I could feel blood flowing down from my forehead.

The stitches went right across my left eye brow. Before the wound could heal I was looking forward to a cool scar that would lend me some character. My face at that time could sure use some ruggedization. Unfortunately that mallu nurse at Martha's did a swell job with the stitching because even I can't find the scar anymore. So that's that! and btw, the ball went in!

2. What is on the walls in your room?
Daddy long legs . post-its.

To be contd.

Salim Ali wrote a book. I just sulked.

There was some commotion in the tree under which I stood waiting for my cab to pick me up. Before I could even look up to inspect, a Barbet nestling crashed to the ground. Evidently not having learnt to fly, it hopped about frantically, trying desperately hard to avoid becoming a meal to some crows that had surrounded it. Here's a trivia: a group of crows is called a "murder". For once, it made complete sense. Each of the crows took turns to hop next to the barbet, ceremoniously gave it a peck and then hopped back. The barbet, meanwhile, squealed so horribly that I felt extremely restless. I felt the need to intervene. I instinctively shooed the crows away. It's hard to just say "Let nature take its course" when you see something like this happening in Bhashyam circle. It just doesn't cut it. Just then, one rather enterprising crow picked up the chick by its wing and flew away awkwardly. Here's when something rather bizarre happened. Two mynas started to chase the crow. It gave the whole episode a dream-like incongruence. They kept trying to make the crow drop the nestling. I stood there thinking I should have picked up the barbet. When my cab arrived the bird was dead. I couldn't stop thinking about it for the next half an hour. The experience was eerily disturbing. And not particularly for how well it summed me up. I manage to have all the right intentions but when it comes to doing anything I just don't seem to know where to begin.

Matte finish please

Completely agree with Chimera on this. I never really understood the reason for those raised doors and walls in western-style toilets. I'll admit they make good props in thriller movies, when you know the victim is in one of the chambers and the serial killer tugs on your nerves as he slowly goes about peeping through the gaps (The killer always starts looking from the wrong end but that's not really his fault). In real life these kinda toilets serve no useful purpose if you ask me. In my previous place of work, they had compounded the inconvenience by laying mirror-finish tiles on the floor. As a result, you had to take extra care not to look down to the sides lest you end up making eye contact with your neighbour's reflection. It's a very sticky social situation, one that not many of us are trained to handle. If you smile, it's plain silly. If you don't it's rude. Either way, the picture sticks in your mind for way too long. Moreover, since you've lost your anonymity you feel compelled to put on your best behaviour. That's not really an ideal environment for crapping.
I vote for a little more privacy.

4 months

Before the first interview, I remember looking at the tie and saying "You dirty colonial relic. I ain't got no use for you". Sure enough the first question I faced was "Why aren't you wearing a tie? Are you trying to make a statement?" Another guy added "It's not even all that hot!". I mumbled something and said "I'm definitely not making a statement". For the rest of the interview three guys distracted me with mindless questions while I preoccupied myself with coming up with clever retorts to that tie question. Esprit d'escalier!
Three months later, I have to attend another interview. It's the hottest goddamn day of the year and I decide to wear a tie. The minute I walk in to the room, my interviewer shows up in a T-shirt and says "You can loosen up your tie, I don't want this to get too formal". I just can't seem to get it right. But here's a useful tip for survival in a phoney world "It's better to be overdressed than under-dressed".

That's what I've been up to. Interviews. Crossing fingers and toes. And hoping against hope. Meanwhile life's been in an extremely uncomfortable state of suspension. I've hit the most formidable fork in the road and it's not my prerogative to pick it up. My nerves have frayed. Trying to be prepared for the worst seems to have made me a chronic pessimist. 8 Floyds. I've begun to question my attitudes too often; like yesterday while J and I were sipping tea from dirty cups in a dhaba I asked "When did I become so unspontaneous?". At least a dozen of those every day. I long to find the much celebrated aaha-moments; 40 second free-falls, Coming back to Life or when S finally arrived. Now, half my sentences begin with "If ...". And that is why this site was shut down too. This evening I realized something. I'm never blogging when I'm taking my life too seriously. I don't know if that's a genuine correlation or just another of my stupid superstitions, but several voices in my head and one outside convinced me that I should start crapping in public domain once again. To the latter, probably my last remaining reader, this post is for you.

A new l'eau

We couldn't help laughing at how the whole Shilpa Shetty episode got blown completely out of proportion, finally ending in the lady getting seriously delusional. ("I'd like to thank Big Brother for giving me the opportunity to make my country PROUD"). Proud? Proud of a big brother winner??? That would disgraceful, even for a country of an average IQ of 80. I watched the videos on youtube - yeah I'm a closet reality show junkie- and I couldn't see much racism. In any case, If I got paid 3.5 crores, there's not a word in any language on this planet or elsewhere that would offend me. Seriously! I'd be willing to put up with mild physical abuse too.

Anyway, we were sitting in the cafeteria discussing how it's nice to be part of a downtrodden race. We retain the liberty to be racist and yet carry the license to cry foul when anybody else indulges in it. The topic then turned to our prejudices. How we judge people based on established stereotypes. The gregarious punjabi who dances all night to variants of the same song, invariably containing the words kudi, munda and chak de phatte. The enterprising but noisy Gujju opening motels all over the world. The bong whose intelligence is only surpassed by his pretentiousness. The mallu who is wire-transferring money from some arabic speaking country. The gult whose summit of accomplishment is the H1B. So on. Stereotypes are extremely handy. They simplify life and give you a reason to not be all understanding and deep and insightful and all those terrible things. Then it struck me that I'm not really aware of what stereotypes are associated with my breed. I thought it would be a nice exercise to discuss that. "Unambitious", "Rude", "Insular" , "Narrow minded" were the spontaneous responses. It was not funny. I so badly wanted to protest and do some brand building. But I have this overpowering need to act like the guy with no allegiances. So I just shut up and grinned like it didn't matter.

Two afternoons later, the Cauvery verdict was declared. Suddenly all the buildings had Karnataka flags on them. (Seriously why does a state need a flag. For that matter why does anybody need a flag?) People were scampering looking for the shortest path home. Some were memorising some kannada sentences. And not entirely in jest too. It suddenly hit me, we are pretty mean.

I don't know what the verdict really meant. I'm sure not many people do. Even if the court had said 500 TMCs for you and 800 for TN, we still would have cried ourselves hoarse. It never was about how much water I need. I suspect it's more about whether I get the bigger share. So next Monday, we'll be on the streets ravaging some effigies and shouting some unimaginative slogans (Beke beku , nyaaya beku????). Vatal Nagaraj will be stop trains and be a complete jerk. Sa Ra Govindu will rouse all the auto drivers into action. We'll all get together and get noticed. If you see a burning Volvo, don't bother calling the fire department, we've got only 200 TMCs.

Bagalkot

I've lived in Bangalore almost all my life. I watched it grow into what it has become now. Despite all it's ills, I still feel pride when when people write and talk about my city like it is the face of progress itself. I know that I'm also in the danger of being fooled into equating Bangalore to the rest of India. Last weekend's trip was, to quote the hideous cliché, a reality check.

Bagalkot is a small town in North Karnataka with not much of a claim to fame except that it is one of the high-profile victims of the Almatti dam. When full, the reservoirs will completely submerge the old town. One of the features that will stay out of water is the Engineering college here. It has 300 students all with the same dreams that any of us had back when we were studying. Not to sound like a pretentious pseudo-self-effacing windbag, but those folks taught me a lot. A lot more than I was chartered to teach them. If nothing, I came back almost feeling guilty for the sinful imbalance in the opportunities that people in Bangalore get as opposed to those outside.

As soon as we arrived on the scene, I figured I had two kinds of colleagues with me. Those that were there to help because they saw a business opportunity that they were going to exploit. Then there were those that were feeding on the cultural cringe and inferiority complex of others in order to boost their own egos. The funny thing however was that despite the lack of any higher ideal or noble cause, it was very tangible that we were helping. So nobody really complained. It wasn't even as serious as I made it sound. At the dinner table while we shared our individual stories and laughed our guts out, we knew we had had a swell time.

What should I use here; the common emitter configuration or the common collector?
first one sir.
Why?
it is better sir.

What's your hobby?
Roaming.
where?
on the road.

What do you read?
books.
Which ones?
Ramayana and Mahabharatha.
Who wrote Ramayana?
Kuvempu

What music do you like?
Silent music.

What is your hobby?
Visiting tourist places.
What's your favourite place?
Belur.
What do you like about it?
The road is very good.

Sane?

Sushmita Sen said in an interview "chastity has no meaning in the current period and it applies to both men and women". I won't venture a judgment on that line because, honestly, I have no idea what that meant. Some Tamil lawyer, however, not only understood it, but also deemed it dangerous enough to our moral fabric to go ahead and slap a case against her in court.

The same lady, it seems, evaded duties on a car she imported. Point it out if you think I'm naïve, but I see no ambiguity here. She ought to be punished here. But the vigilance officer connected to the case doesn't think so. He not only allowed her to submit a letter requesting a waiver, but also arranged a red carpet welcome when she went to his office. ""After all she is a Ms Universe, so the welcome was natural" he says.

I once read an article that placed our national average IQ at 80. I remember feeling outraged then. Now I wonder.

Hampi

The splendour is definitely gone. All you see now are the ruins. Pick a direction to look and you'll find some dilapidated building. The sheer number of construction sites and the area they cover makes you wonder about the grandeur that must have surely existed back when the kingdom was still prospering. It also makes you hate all the idiots who plundered this place. And then you look at the "Y loves X" proclamations that crowd most of the remaining walls and you realise that the race of the idiots still thrives.

The visit to the Vithala temple was probably the highlight of my trip. The musical pillars are mind blowing. This is one of the best preserved monuments in Hampi. I won't be surprised if they discover someday that even the barbarians were moved enough by the sheer beauty to spare this particular temple from destruction. To get the most out of your visit to the Vithala temple you need to have a guide.

Even the best guide, however, will not explain satisfactorily the occurence of all those heaps of rocks in this area. The explanation that came closest to making the cut was the legend that the gods played marbles here.

A portuguese traveller who travelled to the Vijayanagara Kingdom is said to have remarked about Hampi that the retina of the eye has never seen anything quite like it. You probably can still say the same thing about it. Where else would you encounter a lungi-clad waiter in a KhanavaLi serving you Sphagetti Bolognaise or a Moussaka, or a paan chewing lady dressed in an iLkal seere holding a plate of bondas and asking you in English (U.S. International) "Would you like some snacks?"

My New Year's Eve
Three balding men sported pony tails. We laughed like crazy. We went to a gorgeous restaurant called Mango Tree . The wine flowed. Sounds like fun, no?

This was a blog that I really used to enjoy. The author waged wars against a wide variety of irritants - traffic, dentists northies, you name it- and it was therapeutic just to read it. It was nice to know that someone else was feeling the angst on my behalf. It's comforting ; kinda like having a messiah who dies for my sins. But lately, Dr. Pissed seems to have made his peace with the world and the posts have dried up. So I have to do my own cribbing now. Here are some things that piss me off on a regular basis.

Have you noticed these really chummy pairs of bike riders? The kind that feel obligated by some ridiculous social etiquette to ride along next to each other. It's bad enough that they slow me down completely, but what really aggravates me is that while they are doing this they are also obeying the rules of polite conversation, you know, like making occasional eye contact and all. These days, with the helmet rule in place, they can't really have a very meaningful conversation while they are riding, so they have to scream out the words, and have to slow down further. Yet they persist. Turd-brains!

Someone ask Ravi Shastri to shut up. I know magic-eight-balls which had more things to say. "That's just what the doctor ordered" . "That went like a tracer bullet". What the f*** is a tracer bullet anyway!

(These are not completely my words, but they are exactly my thoughts.)
Respect your religion? Firstly, you ask for submission and not respect, so screw you. Next, even if you mean respect, I have no obligation to RESPECT your religion. I respect your right to follow it, but I refuse to respect your/any religion. You don't see me asking you to respect atheism. Stop pissing me off.

I'm back

Back from the self-imposed exile to publish more of my pointless crap. During the break I haven't read a book or watched a movie or a tv show or played a game. This morning I couldn't wait to get my life back. I played basketball like a man possessed. I made a complete fool of myself, missed almost all my shots. And now every muscle hurts. I feel so alive.

I got myself a new job. For the first time in my professional life I completely understand the meaning of the phrase "total wavelength mismatch". I'm not claiming intellectual high ground here. I am surrounded by very intelligent people. I'm just saying if everybody in my team drew venn diagrams representing their interests there won't be a single overlap. It is not the best setting to spend 40 hours in a week.

Never before have I looked forward to the christmas break so eagerly. I want to read the books watch the movies, make a trip... The blog posts will follow.

Words that English ought to borrow

One of the joys of learning a language is the kick that you get when you encounter a truly expressive word that has no equivalent in any other language you know.
How many times have you looked at Emraan Hashmi, Deve Gowda or Himesh Reshammiya and struggled to sum up what you thought about their faces? The germans have just the right word for it. "Backpfeifengesicht": a face that cries out for a fist in it.

Just last fortnight, on our trip to see Kuranji Pushpa, we stopped at a lake called GaLikere for a while. The lake is perched on the top of a mountain and Everytime a strong wind blows, the water tips over from the side. That's how it got it's name. It used to be one of the most pristine spots I've ever seen, until a super-idiotic belief suddenly sprang up. People started to follow the custom of leaving their underwear behind after they took bath there, b********! Anyway, that's not the point of this post. At the lake, I got the chance to show off my skill at the game I used to call, until recently, "bouncing stones on water". Apparently, in dutch (oh I'm so in love with the language) they have a name for the sport, plimpplampplettere.

Every Saturday morning, my mom drives herself into a frenzy and turns the house inside out in her quest to personally attack every dust particle. In deutschland they call the mania Putzfimmel.

Read this article.

Meet Goobe

Meet Goobe. A cat who until recently was an uninvited guest in our balcony. He used to hang around there at night, and take flight as soon as we opened the door.

Meet my sis. She has held snakes in her hand but she is completely scared of butterflies and moths. Scared enough to cry when a hapless butterfly happens to get into the house.

Last week, Goobe won himself a lifelong devotee when he jumped up acrobatically and caught a moth. He now gets food and drink on the house, and also has a cozy little mat for himself to sleep on.

I was bugged of tags ere I was tagged by 'bug

Regular vistors to this page will note that this blog serves to satisfy the self-absorption of it's author. So when another opportunity to talk about himself came along, he gladly latched on.

The origin of my nick name, Deppe, is shrowded in mystery. I have a vague recollection of being christened thus when I was in engineering. I also have a faint memory of having hated the name. Much later, while I was talking to myself, I caught one of my inner voices addressing another as Deppe. Shocking!

I am obsessed with reading number plates on vehicles and making judgements about the driver based on his origin. Not unlike people who say "Oh! you are cancerian? That explains it", I , for example, look out for the number plates of drivers who honk incessantly and feel very gratified when I see KA-06 (Tumkur) or KA-11 (Mandya). I'm trying to quit this habit btw.

There was a time I was really fanatical about my home town, Bangalore. Now I practically hate it. If there's any geographical feature in India I am parochial about, it is the Western Ghats. I got childishly angry once when somebody said the ghats are very monotonous.

The ghats have never looked as stunning as during the last couple of weeks. There are particular weirdos in the plant family that inhabit this part of the deccan. Every 12 years they all bloom together and cover the peaks with a purple carpeting. It's a sight to behold. I digressed...

I once stood for elections for the post of class rep, after someone nominated me in jest. I gave the worst possible speech; I said nothing. I got 3 votes ( or was it 2?). I like to think that my life would have turned out dramatically different if I had got just one vote.

To be continued...

Jobless

Why did the french invent a spelling scheme so unappealing to my sense of logic? What's the fun if half the letters in a word are silent? It's not pretty. Not at 7 in the morning. I really think they should reform their spellings a bit. Now that would be a French Revolution I'd appreciate.

Forenoons and afternoons are for interviews. I enjoy the interviews, except for the one ocassion when Toshiro Mifune himself quizzed me while wearing his Samurai temper on his sleeve. What I don't enjoy, though, is driving all those miles in this unbelievably horrible traffic, a topic I intend to crib about in greater detail in succeeding posts.

Evenings remind me about the joys of being unemployed.

Just before I hit the sack, I wish the day had a few more hours. Someone told me that that's a good sign.

Hyderabad trip

Everytime I travel in a bus, train or plane, I always end up sitting next to an obscenely obese gentleman. Each time, I wait for the law of averages to catch up with me and usher in some long overdue justice, preferably in the form of a hot-babe neighbour in the bus. I sent up a little prayer before boarding the bus to Hyderabad, but apparently I'm not doing it right. The guy who sat next to me looked like he could easily edge Yokozuna out of the dohyo.

As a result, I was playing mind games with the fatso all night long when I should have been sleeping. Straightaway I realised that I was the underdog, and I graciously relinquished all my rights on the common armrest. But these fatsos never stop there. As soon as they sleep, they spill over in all directions. My first course of action was to repeatedly recline and straighten my seat in order to point out that large chunks of adipose had made their way to the wrong side of the common armrest. When that failed to work, I took jerky jabs with my elbow to upset his peace, while pretending that I'm doing all that in my sleep. I must add that I adhered to all bullet points on the geneva convention's regulations for this kind of warfare; my elbow never once left my airspace. But sigh! I guess the nerve endings were buried too deep down because he didn't budge an inch. I gave up trying to sleep.

Apparently, I've accumulated a lot of bad karma, because on the return trip I sat next to a man, who in an ideal world, would voluntarily buy two tickets for himself.

And here's the vote of thanks.

K, you're a swell host buddy. Although you should work on your welcome gestures. Atleast wear a few more clothes.

M & A, thanks for the charming company. See you in bangalore soon.

I'm pissed

oh boy! Give the book a break. It was written a million years ago. Those things do go out of date, you know? Maybe the guys who wrote it were the smartest people at the time, but for fuck's sake, they may have got it wrong. Take Aristotle. He was bloody smart but he misunderstood his own outstanding brain; the guy thought that it was an organ to cool the blood. They get it wrong sometimes.

Who the hell gave those other turd-brains the right to make you sing something you don't wanna sing?

nationality and religion. Why do people expect you to be loyal to choices you never made?