apocalypse now

Mon : Digital Signal Processing
Tue : Statistical Physics
Wed : Solid State Devices
Thur : Dynamical Systems
Fri : Operations Research

The horror, the horror.

And what's more, my tooth hurts.
Not just any old tooth. My wisdom tooth.

Maybe, a couple of days before the exams commence, i should consider that as a sign of some sort, a portentous omen foretelling my impending doom.

Only one Keano

Goodbye, captain.
Farewell.

Thanks for everything.
We'll miss you.

a show of hands

If there's one thing that i really don't get, it's people who eat pizza with knives and fork.

For god's sake!

A pizza is meant to be touched by searching fingers, felt up, its nether regions caressed, and after the taste-bud stimulating preliminaries, gently bitten into - thin, long noodle straps of mozzarella and dripping sauce only heightening the already unbearable pleasure of weakly submitting to the evil embrace of junk food.

Crystal ball

On nights like these, I sometimes get the nasty feeling that I will turn out like that.

Gregor Samsa ?

Somebody asked me the other day, in the midst of the sort of asinine conversation that I tend to indulge in daily, if I thought I had changed even a little bit after entering college.
Given my propensity for brushing truly thought-provoking matters under the mental carpet, I instantly replied that I hadn't , with a shake of the head and a flutter of the eyelashes.
(Incidentally, I have been informed that my eyelashes are very long. How people make such observations is beyond me, but I digress).

Though not quite all weird and wonderful, my two years here have been very eventful. Considering the wide spectrum of experiences I have had, from seeing drunken men teetering(quite literally) on the brinks of terraces for the very first time, to finding mashed cockroaches in my lunch, I wouldn't believe it entirely inappropriate if i generously borrowed from classic literature to describe the Dickensian montage of happenings that i have had the (mis?)fortune of being touched by.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way"

It is impossibe, I contend, to remain the same in such circumstances, surrounded by such individuals. Before you know it, you are a different man.

1)It seems like an eternity ago that I stepped into the campus for the first time , armed with a plastic smile, a suitcase of neatly pressed clothes, and an idealistic fervour. I only retain one of those now. One-and-a-half, perhaps.

2) I don't remember ever being really unhappy growing up. Even if I sometimes morosely observed as a young teenager that all great creative artistes seemed to have suffered deeply in some profound manner, my childhood was essentially beautiful.
Wish i could say the same of the last two years.

3)This might sound strange, but if anything, i am much more ethical than i was before joining college. I have come to dislike the careless way people here flout basic norms, from copying in exams to getting around the fairly light attendance requirements by forging signatures.

4)In school, for whatever reason, I considered myself to be some sort of genius, the promising bud just waiting to grow into the blooming flower that would be embraced by the world.
Not anymore.

5)I am now a bonafide movie-freak. From anime to neo-realism to fantasy, I've begun my journey to seeing it all. Movies were never a past-time of mine as a kid, and if there is one thing I am really thankful to my college for, it is for inculcating a love for the moving image.

One day, maybe, after a night of uneasy dreaming, I will find myself transformed into a gigantic insect.

P.S
I feel prodigiously talkative today.
It must be the eclipse.

blue

Its been two weeks since I last updated, my longest hiatus since the inception of this blog. I have no excuses, or explanations, for such neglect , bar the fact that I seem to be drowning this semester in a tsunami (pardon the expression, will you) of academic commitments. If all the pressure of handling seven hardcore courses that come in varying degrees of inanity doesn't kill me, the mind-numbing ennui will, soon enough.

I just need to find a way to stand back, pause, take a deep breath, and not feel guilty about it.

a day in the life

The sky looks beautiful today. A very deep shade of light blue, cloudless but for a lone dark wisp meekly threatening to sprinkle a few drops of rain. The breeze quietly rustles through the leaves, blowing gently behind your back as you accelerate downhill on your way to an 8 am class on your bicycle. You roll along merrily , humming CCR's Proud Mary.
Days like these make you happy, and you thank god that the powers-that-be had the good sense to ban all powered vehicles on campus.

You take a window seat in Digital Signals Processing, periodically dropping in on the professor's drone on the regions of convergence in Z-transforms. You begin to reflect on his eccentricities, and conclude that he looks like Fido-Dido and Dilbert rolled into a cat on a hot tin roof. The hour passes, a trifle slowly, ending with his lamentations on the absence of any budding mathematicians in class, our limitations horribly exposed by the inability to prove a corollory of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra.

As you walk down to Spectroscopy, you think of Will Hunting, and how you secretly think you are a bit like him. You wonder if you are capable of throwing everything away, as 'you had to see about a girl'. This quandrary still unresolved, you enter class. The professor is teaching for the first time in his life, and he looks at you with big searching eyes and bunny-teeth for a little support, maybe even some encouragement.You try to acquiesce.His daughter is sick in hospital, and he has spent the night with her. You hope she gets better soon, and you consider what it feels like to be a father. A father with a sick child.

Solid State Devices is next, and you marvel at how elegant the lady professor looks today. It confirms your theory that any woman can be made to look pretty, if not spectacular, if dressed well. Her saccharine sweet voice lulls you into a dreamy reverie, interspersed with metaphoric electric-aid-kool-acid-visions into energy band diagrams and the theory of p-n junctions.

Dynamical Systems is next, and as is becoming an irritatingly regular habit, the instructor fails to turn up. You chat with one of the few people you consider your friend, and mutually decide that Meredith Brooks' 'Bitch' is a fine song to perform at a 'Western Music' (daftly named, i know) contest, especially if you are from the girl's hostel. On a lark, you begin singing Sixpence None the Richer's 'There She Goes',and soon it's time for lunch.

You have your best lunch in weeks, and troop up to your room on the top floor of your hostel. You turn on the computer,and begin listening to Lisa Loeb's beautiful 'Stay'. You get annoyed with Blogspot, which does not allow you to make any comments on your own blog.

You decide to update. It's been more than a week now.

Soon, in thirty minutes, you will attend Statistical Physics, followed by a free hour you plan to spend staring at her. A class of Industrial Engineering, and plenty of really bad puns from the good-natured professor later, you'll be back, another day in your life washed away by the trivialities of existence.

Splurge

On Sunday, as fate would have it, I found myself in the possesion of gift vouchers worth, atleast by my frugal standards, an obscene amount of money at a prominent bookstore in the city, one that makes up for its overbearing pretentiousness with a decidedly above average collection of classic literature. Any bookshop that houses multiple copies of "Raise high the roof beam, carpenters " and "The Bell Jar" wins my immediate seal of approval, let it be known.

So off I went, two other similarly fortunate souls in tow, to the heart of the city, finding myself in the decidedly unique situation of having money to splurge. I have always found looking at price tags of books a little humiliating, and though it is a habit far too deeply entrenched in my psyche for me to lose it overnight, it always stings less when the pockets are bulging.

This is what, after three hours of frenetic price-totalling and much soul-searching, i finally bought -

The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson
The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (in a dead cheap edition that made me wonder if they forgot to print another digit on the price tag)
Selected Works of Kahlil Gibran (as Kristian will testify, I have been after this for a while)
The Plays of Anton Chekov(including 'The Cherry Orchard", the play everyone has been plaguing me to read)
The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (massive 1000 page tome, this one, including the original Spanish verse)

I was also sorely tempted to buy a translation of Vatsyayana's Kamasutra, but decided against it in the end, the reasons for which i am not entirely certain myself. Perhaps it was a sub-conscious thing. You never know when that book might come in useful, though.

As I opened the Dickinson collection, the lines on the very first page struck me, Emily's genius already established with the potency of these startling verses :

This is my letter to the world
That never wrote to me
The simple news that Nature told
With tender majesty

Her message is committed
To hands i cannot see
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

Very appropriate for this, or indeed any blog, don't you think?

heart-to-heart

I have often been informed, by various sources, that we got along famously when I was younger. Like houses on fire, setting the neighbourhood alight with our dazzling displays of public affection for each other.

There are even pictures to prove it, of me nestling on your stomach , looking evry bit the movie-star I was never destined to be, my face ethereal in the knowledge that I would not rather be anywhere else in the world.
Incidentally, I believe these are probably the only pictures of mine in existence, apart from the group photos that seem to be such essential ingredients of high-school graduation days. Yes, that one. The one mom coerced you to attend.

You will appreciate that it is incredibly difficult for me to establish what went wrong, or do any finger-pointing in your direction. Perhaps it is all my fault, of never living up to your expectations, for being the quiet introverted son that you never wanted.

Maybe it all started to unravel that day in the fifth grade when I reported that I had stood fourth in a class of forty, and was greeted by that look of derision which haunts me to this day. Or when I overhead you telling mom how 'certain people' are born selfish, such as me, and how 'nothing can be done about it'.Or when you left home to work in another city, those long years when mom and me had only each other to seek some solace in, your periodic appearances at home becoming increasingly sporadic as I waded uncertainly through my early teens.

I always had this image in my mind of having a perfect family, the textbook kind, with dinner-table conversations and jolly picnics. All you contributed was that ferocious anger and unpardonable violence, taking out all your frustrations on us with words that stung and hit where they really hurt. Even after twenty-one years of marriage to mom, you still make her cry. You should be ashamed.

I don't want to be bitter anymore. I want to move on, and not have my disappointments with you hang like an albatross around my neck.

All I will say is that I hope my little sister doesn't turn out the way I have, self-loathing and often depressed, though it breaks my heart to say that it looks inevitable. Be nice to her, if atleast only till she's half the fine woman she still could become.

And so, happy birthday,your fifty-first, if i am not mistaken. Blow them candes( hypothetical, of course), and make those wishes, and I sincerely hope they come true.

Here's to a better future.

creep

Today is the lowest I've felt in the last ten months.
Useless, incompetent, unwanted, and alone.

Tablet time.

Catharsis

"Did you know that eating alone could cause kidney damage ? "

-Sean Penn, in 21 Grams

It all seems so long ago now, a veritable eternity, when I swore to myself in a typically foolhardy fit of bravado that I would never go out of campus alone again.

Oh no, I had told myself on that particularly depressing night in the town last semester, next time I shall find someone to accompany me on my (usually) forthnightly jaunts outside the
college gates, atleast for the sake of my kidneys, if nothing else.

However, being the fickle-minded weak-willed person that I am, yesterday I set off, alone , for the ocean (It's really a bay, but I prefer calling it an ocean. So much more grand, no? ) , deciding to make a quick stop at the college library, in a vain attempt to salvage some course-books , the ones not already usurped in furious early-semester raids by my studious peers.

Incidentally, I was wearing a Kurt Cobain T-Shirt, which, as you will appreciate, is as good a shirt as any when you are feeling a bit suicidal, and the librarian , with the keen eye and sharp intellect that landed him the job, asks me:

"Hey, who is this Kurt Cobain ?", in an accent generously smeared by the local tongue.

"Err, he is a singer, and a song-writer ", I reply, a little self-consciously.

"Oh, like Michael Jackson ! ", he jumps up, all excited by this piece of knowledge he has just acquired.

"Err, yes sir. Absolutely. "

The book I had asked him to register was Suzuki's "Living by Zen ".
Nirvana, at that very moment, has never seemed further away.

Thus, I made my way to the college gates, and proceeded on to my destination, the air all the time getting cooler, and soon I could smell the ocean-spray, and see the world dancing before me in those innumnerable grains of sand. No wild flowers though, heaven (or hell, for that matter) would have to wait. No new arrival today.

And there it was, in Jackson Pollock like blobs of white and moon-lit black, leading its own lonely life of quiet desperation, flowing in a mad rush to nowhere, trying to reach my sprawled self in relentless pursuit, but failing, like all the people before it who have cared to try the same. So I went closer, slowly, cautiously, and felt its soft, cool touch on my palm, stroking me , consoling me.

And you know what, it felt pretty good.
My soon to be eroded footprints on the sand below, a solitary star nestling in the quiet serenity of the crescent moon above, and infinity beyond.

A quiet dinner in a crowded restaurant , and a long walk later, I was back in my room, purged of all the negativity of the past few days. No more sadness, I would think, for a week atleast.

Only one other problem still persists.
Game for a kidney transplant, anyone?

Fact of the Day

I don't mean to gloat or anything, but did you know that my maternal grandfather's first cousin, and his uncle, are both recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics?

It's little wonder then, that the rest of the family suffers from a congenital inferiority complex regarding the capabilities of their grey matter, or the lack thereof.

Play the ending again, Sam

I was watching When Harry met Sally the other day, and amidst comic capers and fake orgasms, Harry raises an issue that remains wholly contentious to me to this day - the ending of Casablanca.

Why in the world does Humphrey Bogart allow the incandescent Ingrid Bergman to leave Casablanca with the very creepy-looking Victor Lazslo character, especially when he holds all the cards ?
It's simply beyond me.

Just look at Ingrid, Humphrey, for Chrissakes . She's so bea-yoo-ti-ful, and she loves you.

And what do you do? You let her go.

Sometimes I feel I understand men even lesser than I understand women.

Book-Worm-Hole

I made another one of my increasingly frequent forays into a bookshop yesterday, seeking , as ever, to dissolve the ennui of a now tedious vacation in the please-grope-me smell of fresh paper.

Armed with little more than conspicuously light pockets, i stepped cautiously into the decidedly regal premises, and felt the full force of a dozen 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' hard-bound editions staring me in the face, snickering in all their over-hyped, but i must admit, not wholly undeserved glory.

After this rather inauspicious beginning, i started looking around the vast and immensely complicated labyrinth, stumbling hurriedly past sections entitled Cookery (I've never understood the motivation for buying, leave alone writing, cookbooks) , General Knowledge (whatever that may be), Erotica ( ok, so i sneaked a little peek here), and reached Literature, quietly occupying a little corner, uninhabited but for a Japanese girl feverishly haranguing a shop-attendant for a copy of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club.

Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.

With a half-smile, and afore-mentioned fatalistic utterances, now on my lips, I look up and see a new edition of The Fountainhead, the redesigned cover lily-white and Communist Red,colurs i would have thought hardly appropriate.
Howard Roark, i am sure, laughed.

Jack Kerouac simply sits, in satori-induced stupor, not taking insult, in true Buddhist fashion, at the ignominy of being placed next to Jackie Collins(why are you here ?),and I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Continuing on my merry ride, i spot other masters laid to a dusty rest, Gogol's Dead Souls probably lamenting Sophocles' Tragedies (under 'Greek', you see) , Kawabata and Murakami and Ishiguro and Oe trying manfully to catch the Japanese cutie's attention, Huxley's Doors of Perception leading to Hugo's Hunchback, and so on and on and on in a never-ending rollercoaster through the literary ages.

And after three hours or so , With the customary sigh, i prepared to troop out, Neruda's clouds waving white handkerchiefs of goodbye, my pockets still feeling the same, but my spirit well and truly uplifted, when Scott Fitzgerald, genius of the Jazz Age, chronicler of the 1920s, beckons me one last time, and who am I to refuse?

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Before I die, I want to own a book-shop.

20 something

Twenty is such an awful age. I can't even blame my deficiencies on teenage angst anymore.

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed- interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit- crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future.

From Trainspotting

Ahhh.
So many choices, so little time.

Wish

I just wish tomorrow goes by as quickly , and as painlessly, as possible .

The sun is the same
in a relative way,
But you're older.
Shorter of breath, and
One year closer to death.

Circle of Life

You could, one day, if the notion appeals to you, find yourself an empty bench in the neighbourhood park and watch the world go by, joining me, in unspoken harmony, in observing the curious traits of an unhappy civilization.

Let us, for the sake of brevity, assume the aforesaid park is roughly circular in shape, its circumference eternally lined by teeming multides of walkers, joggers et al, performing their daily exercises oblivious, or perhaps disdainful, of nature's bounty spread out like a tiny forest across the centre.

Notice, if you will, the top software company executive, attired in designer walk-wear, striding along like a pot-bellied colossus, earplugs in one ear, cell phone kissing the other. Quietly following him, his wife (by arranged-marriage, of course) looks around sadly, discontentedly, the dissatisfaction in her eyes impossible to miss.

Groups of women chatter along excitedly,no doubt playing out their own mobile version of 'Desperate Houswives', complete with fake Nikes on pedicured feet and simulated concern in hoarse voices. A single, lonely old woman then walks by, arms swinging in true Hitlerian fashion, the determination in her eyes fiercely contesting the truth which her failing body cannot hide - the inevitability of death.

Suddenly, as you look closer, a grandfather appears on the scene, pushing a little pram having, presumably, his infantile grandson. They move anti-clockwise, unlike everybody else, and get in everyone's way. The baby, dotted on its cheek to ward off the evil eye, invites broad smiles, the grandfather receives only cold stares.

Amidst all the quiet mayhem, you , and I, half the world apart, softly whistle 'Colonel Bogey's March', and do nothing.

Memory Lane

The sun today, as is its wont at this time of year, chose to hide behind the big fluffy clouds that blanketed the sky in great black portentous wisps. The wind, not daring to disturb the delicate equanimity in the firmament, blew gently, soothingly. And I, never one to pass over as fine an oppurtunity as this, walked a few miles down memory lane, to the house of my childhood.

The roads were empty, and I strode quickly, hopping over little brown puddles of water, remnants of late night thunderstorms and poverty-stricken tears. As the roads slowly began to grow narrower, and the skyline shorter, I knew I had arrived again in the old neighbourhood, three years after I had left without as much as a goodbye.

I gazed down at my feet as I walked, studiously avoiding old acquaintances who chanced upon my path, when all of a sudden, without warning, i was engulfed in an irrepressible wave of nostalgia, and thoughts safely locked away in a never-to-be-delved-into-again reservoir exploded through the proverbial floodgates, overwhelming me with the sheer ferocity of their reminiscence.

And so, i gave in, and remembered. The memories simply came rushing back.

Memories of growing up, of spending ten years of childhood,
of living in a neighbourhood that was more ghetto than suburbia,
of the utter decrepitude of the buildings, windows broken, walls peeling, pillars threatening,
of how poverty and beauty meshed so completely that you couldn't tell the difference,
of interminably long summer vacations spent playing hide-and-seek around the infinitely complex maze of run-down sheds,
of cross-breed stray dogs we christened after reigning beauty queens,
of butchers beside temples, and mosques behind, and never was a stone thrown in anger,
of people who were there before me, and are predestined to stay there forever,
of the first pair of twins i ever knew, with rhyming names and identical clothes and everything, bless them,
of climbing trees in the neighbourhood park- the regular haunt of cosying-up couples, and as legend would have it, the occasional rapist,
of strange old men with giant-size pipes and vintage cars and foul mouths,
of the jangling sound of coins in my pocket that were never enough for what i really wanted,
of the flea-market, teeming with diseased flies and a million lies, and the vegetable vendor who never gave the discount he offered the last time around,
of the first, and only, time i have stared at a teacher for a time more than that was strictly necessary,
of prodigious imaginations that would have conjured up profound visions of apocalypse at my sudden departure,
of the best friends i ever had, and lost.

And i closed my lips in a soft 'goodbye' , turned and walked away, and closed one chapter of my life.

Forever.

Experiments with truth

I spent my evening today watching Rodgers and Hammerstein's singularly influential contribution to the Austrian tourism industry ,'The Sound of Music'. Cut to a converation between the Von Trapp children.

Brigitta (observing the guests in the ballroom): "The women look so beautiful!"
Kurt: "I think they look ugly."
Louisa: "You just say that because you're scared of them."
Kurt: "Silly, only grown-up men are scared of women"

We find wisdom in the most unexpected places.

Passing

Writer's block is a cruel, cruel way to die.