Hello reader. This part of my blog is to welcome you, new comer, to my blog, and walk you around my site, so that you feel at a greater ease. 
So, what can you do? You could read more About Me, or just browse through the posts which appear in the Main Page, Poems page and the Tags page. Feel free to read through any post you wish to read. Let the titles interest you as an initiation.
Wednesday evening, battling a mid-week sickness, I was in a delusional state that it was a Friday. Every time it dawned upon me that it wasn’t a Friday, I had to make the painstaking journey back to reality. I was riding back home on my beloved cruise bike. Perfect conditions for a nice ride on a cool Bangalore evening. Traffic was thinning on the Outer Ring Road and I felt my bike surge ahead of most vehicles with ease. Speeding in the nimble nineties, taking for granted the smooth and all-familiar ORR, I was in for a surprise, a nasty one at that. In a flash, I saw a pot hole, had no means to avoid it, stood upon the foot pegs, let my bike run into it, and after what seemed like a punch in the face, recovered some how without any loss of balance and continued.
Pause, Rewind, Slow-Mo, Play!
So, I was on the Outer Ring Road, riding my bike, when one Tata Sumo moving ahead of me swerved left around something. I thought I saw a pot hole. What I also saw in my rear-view mirror, was a lorry on a roll, speeding with the same fervor as mine. So, the possibility of braking was ruled-out. I braced up for the situation, positioning myself into a least damageable posture, braking enough to reduce my speed and still keep myself from reaching the lorry’s wheels, and finally, as if taking a plunge in a pool, entered the pot hole, the impact strained my neck, my bike gave a shudder, I came out of it, retained my balance and had to move on as if nothing happened.
Pause, Rewind, Slow-Mo, Play!
Lorry, Sumo, pothole, everything was happening in a rush. In less than a second, I saw it, tried to avoid it, tried to minimize the impact, tried to avoid going under the lorry’s wheels, went into the pot hole, came out and cruised along. But, a few nasty effects revealed themselves later. looked like, my front wheel had the maximum impact. The rim became askew, a few spokes were bent, the drum got cracked, the fork got compressed by nearly 4 inches, the left side seal of the fork ruptured, some of the fork oil spilled over, the fork got bent too, handle alignment went haywire, the rear wheel was bent and my bike was not the same.
It was incapacitated. Its torture could be felt. Its wails could be heard. It was limping in the front and crying like it had never cried before. But it somehow retained its resilience, and did its duty to bring me home. It knew that its master would never inflict such torment on to it deliberately, that its wounds would make cuts in his heart (and of course, burn a hole in his pocket). And I, the loving master that I am, wiped off those remnants of anguish from it.
If only I had the chance to kick someone in the balls and land a second kick again right there, it’d be to the fellow who was responsible for making an unsuspecting pot hole on a beautifully laid, signal-free road such as the Outer Ring Road.
… by the looks of it, we’re gonna die, sooner or later, but surer than we think we would, and despite being aware of the bounds that are constantly present in our lives, there is a lot of clamour in our heads by thoughts that mostly don’t matter, surrounding the things that we don’t have in our lives, favoring the people that we would rather not be talking to, spending time that makes us feel dumber by the minute, and still hanging on to the clamour as if that is the single most important entity giving us a sense of existence, importance and purpose, which rather puts me on the verge of losing my sanity, while I am transitioning from a world of colour, interest, enthusiasm and fascination into a world where all things appear mediocre, all colours being shades of grey, black, white or blue, fascination and enthusiasm simply being two of the sarcastic words hurled at you by people who are driven by an apparent cloud in their minds that they are leading a life worthy of example, yet subjecting themselves to clandestine self-deception by the blurring boundaries between people, getting interlaced with their prejudices, their opinions about other people, relationships, friend circles, social strata, clout, wealth, attitude and many other vices that desist the natural affinity, or its anti thereof, that people should have developed as second nature. I sense a world that is getting closer coldly inside the circles of walls of a socialisation myth and enjoying the essence of a person only as a short, distant flutter in the unbeknownst plains of mental fabric, as opposed to a blazing sense of warmth that just happens when you let your thoughts reach out to a person and feel the enormity of his/her being, the nuances of their movements, the subtlties of their behavior and the complexity of their personalities forming an impeccable sketch of an entity representing a more accurate virtual persona than t person artificially tends to portray himself as, more so, like watching an idea taking shape, like a design of, say, a car, forming in your head: the lines, contours, bends, curves, grills and stuff that give u a vision of the car, driving you to put it into action and see it taking shape, consistent with what you visualised, with what you committed to the CAD software, finally taking shape and presented to you as a representation of a part of your being, translated into reality. Its like you have moulded a part of your brain, poured your soul into it, and felt like a true creator. Bah! I’m sounding like Steve Jobs now. But people like him are required once in a while for other people to notice that the World needed much more than a Blackberry, and thanks to him, I’m able to enjoy fantastic designs and interfaces on my Android phone. After all, he pioneered a movement, a phenomenon, that would rapidly self sustain and foster its own development, either by innovation, inspiration, replication, or even castigation. It all follows the rules of Nature, where species learn to exist and co-exist by looking at other species and learning a trick or two about predation, defence, food gathering and essentially, survival. Thankfully those methods were not patented, lest humankind would have had to literally pay with our skins for eating other animals and learning it from the wild beasts that marked the precursor to our existence. I sometimes wonder how we would have survived had we not done that then, while my parents admonish me for being a non-vegetarian now! Their concern reaches no known corners of my intricate mind even as I try to reason with them that I’m neither eating pseudo-chicken from KFC nor a chicken like pattice from McD. Even though these brands don’t contribute to my diet directly, I do revel in the wafts of aroma emanating from such outlets which will make me go in search of a place that offers greater, more aromatic, healthy food that quenches my never ending desire to pamper my taste buds to the extent of propelling me to an elevated sense of mind, seconding only the orgasmic joy that a goddess blesses you with for the amount of affection that you serve as an offerring to the Love that you share. Bonds such as those are hard to come by and harder still to get over if severed. The gravity of such a realization dawned when it happened to me and I hope that it’d be the last time I face any such thing, unlike in the story of a Cro-magnon who managed to live to present day, suffering many such heart-breaks and managing to forget quite a few, while he just existed as the oblivious World aged, as an observer who brings with him a window to the period of pre-historic man, the first civilizations, spiritual superlings such as the Buddha and events in World History that changed the path of mankind for good, bringing to us a speculative perspective of a halo surrounding a man hailed as the Son of God. Frankly, if we were all created by one God as is popular belief, why only that Son is special then? Everybody else are bastards then aa? What will be enough to stop us all in our tracks and take a relook into our lives and check if we dont suck at living, instead of clinging on to what Sons of Gods are telling? If you cared enough to look at it simply, they are also telling this only, “Oh dear sons and daughters of my divine father, lead your lives well and don’t suck at it!” Ayyo, like one fish market, so much of cow dung comes to our heads like ‘my god is this’, ‘your god is that’, ‘my this’, ‘my that’, ‘my brother’s this’, ‘my friend’s that’, and all, and we lock it inside as if some one will come and steal off the warm aroma. You want such aroma means, work as a garbage collector in Bangalore city. Very good business now, I say. Some garbage heaps will scare even a rag picker to run away from 1 kilometer also. You simply go and take money from people to collect it and throw in other place, instead of garbagi-fy-ing your head. Good idea no? But if such a thing is already there, I fear that this is also a Mafiaed business like begging, havala, and trafficking. So much pain in our minds, lives and society, and as if that was not enough, these sons of bitches come off to keep theirs also in this glory hole. Besides, these kinds of shit are so well-networked that it will put a technocrat like me to shame because people like me are working as if our lives depend on it, on networks which are striving to be as painlessly seamless as possible, all the while discarding old technologies that were hailed as life-savers in their Yay!-days, creating devices that vie for a customer’s heart, mind and soul, so that they will buy them, love them and expose themselves to the device more than they would, to their lovers, while these devices constantly play sneek-peek with the user’s info such as where he goes, what he eats, whom he sleeps with and what his dog’s poop smells like, and effectively helping some fourteenth party company to tailor ads for his special needs, ads that appear more like wannabe sluts who want to sell themselves because they can’t get sold if they din’t shove up their cleavage into the faces of gaping perverts. Traditional ad banners are lot better that way, in the sense that they are atleast restricted by the proportional cost of real-estate that they occupy and the short duration of a person’s attention that they enjoy, much like the interval that a human being gets to live as compared to the scale of the Universe, often touted as only a few milliseconds in the scale of a day, and yet living every moment of life desperately submerging themselves in one quest after another, seemingly oblivious to the timer ticking behind their backs. If you get to know a person and manage to figure out the quest he is on, and try to extrapolate it on a global scale, visualizing it as teeny weenie sparks of light from fireflies traversing a void and forming intricate patterns, some glimmering more than others, some swaying more than the others, some losing out in between, some showing the way, some attracting others, some simply lingering and revelling and immersing me in a delusion that transforms the immensity of such sparks as stars in the infinite sky, filling joy and wonder, and reminding me of my childhood self singing the nursery rhyme “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, How I wonder what you are. Up above the World so high, Like a diamond on Aishwarya Rai”. No, that wasn’t the Rhyme I learnt, but diamonds and Aish were analogous for most time in my childhood, thanks to Nakshatra ads, and despite my reservations about her beauty, she remains the mascot of diamonds for me. The tag-line for the ad goes : “Diamonds are forever”, but seems like this post can’t be (sigh!) just like we can’t be too, and be it either on our own individual expiry dates or the widely proclaimed doomsday that the Mayans thought would occur in 2012, by the looks of it, we’re gonna die, sooner or later, but surer than we think we would…
A woman is depressed because her body fairness is not matching the color of her face. A few moments later, she appears to have won a tennis match and guess what is focused? Her body is as fair as her face. So, when did fairer arms and shoulders start winning matches!
A bunch of women, and female counterparts of some alien race descend on the Earth and break into a skinny guy’s room just because he used an extra-strong variant of a popular deodorant. If the deodorant plays a great pimp to supply women to its users, I think it should come with a string attached that the supply of jaw-droopingly-smoking-hot women is limited. How otherwise is it possible that not even a female mosquito came buzzing into my room when I used it?
A South Indian actor is making a fool of himself when he keeps falling for women who always have two things in common : they have a girl child and they use the same brand of soap. Oh yes, the girl child stood first in her class again.
A house maid is on fire as soon as she smells a man. Err, it’s not the odor of the man really. It’s just another deodorant brand which just happens to be modest with the quantity “supplied”.
There is this brand of mango-pulp that has sold since a long time. In comes an actress to be the selling face of this drink. She simply savors the taste of the drink, but she makes it look so sensuous that I thought that she was going through phenomenal hormonal trickery which is known to happen only during intense love-making sessions. Bah! so much ado over mango pulp.
Now, the icing on the cake. No Bollywood movie seems to be complete without an “item” number. So, who are being projected as “items”?
These are subtle, micro doses of delusions that are sprinkled generously across popular media. Each of it isn’t a serious threat to bar it as obscene, yet collectively, they deeply embed a dormant stimulus into a person’s psyche.
And that is a bad thing.
Everyday between 11am and 12 noon, and in a couple of other time periods, there is this dilemma about wishing people. You know, 11 am is neither so morning and 12 noon is nor afternoon yet. Similarly, the time between 3.30 pm and 4.30 pm is neither so afternoon, nor so evening. And, the time around 8pm and 9pm is neither so evening nor so night.
You get the drift right? 
So, in tune with an average Indian’s itch to keep things diverse, and considering the vast spectrum of time periods available in a day, I wish that The OUP considers introducing a few words to the English Diction.
I want words like Earlymorn, Morning and Aftermorn, to address different times before 11am.
Words like Earlynoon, Noon and Afternoon, for times between 11am and 4pm.
And, you guessed it right, Earlyeve, Evening and Aftereve for times between 4pm and 9pm.
After that, anyway, it could be called as Night, in general. But we could extend our fine(r)-grained time naming to Night time and coin terms like Earlynight, Midnight, and Afternight, for the times between 9pm and say, 4am.
The English might not have been very busy in days of the past, when greetings like “Good Morning” came into existence. However, times changed and the greetings remained as is. Because of this my generation finds it hard to feel right while greeting. Besides that, the greetings sound so cliched. What do you really mean by Good Morning? That my Morning alone be good and the rest of the day be bad? In contrast, we can remove these bunch and just have a parting phrase “Good Day” do the business. Short, and sweet.
In retrospect, Indians were very sensible. We can wish a humble “Namasthe” and it goes well with any time of the day. It really doesn’t belong to any time/day/month/whatever.
It is used to greet the person, and greet him well.
Plain and simple.
I’d been to a wedding recently. She was my classmate in college and during those sweet times, I’d a huge crush on her feet. Yes! they were so good, I wondered if having a crush on feet was normal. Anyway, I couldn’t just stand there and be lost in my memoirs of her feet. As with many marriages, this one had a good supply of most eligible bachelors and bacheloresses exhibiting themselves. Even though my eligibility criteria are far from good, I’d an awesome time ogling at the chicks dressed well, carrying themselves well and smiling as if that day would be their lucky day.
There was this seemingly unlimited free flowing melody ringing in my head from the violins and waltzes, every time I saw a very eligible chick. Little that I know that my time would change, and drastically so! There came a familiar face, only that it had bulged considerably compared to the last time I’d seen it. Studying the approaching structure, I realized that it was not just the face, but even the body sorta had a mini explosion inside with uncleared debris remaining. She was another classmate of mine walking up to us bunch of guys. We all had the same feeling looking at her. It was evident from their faces. “Dude.. How could this happen!!”
—- snip a few minutes of catching up and chit chat —-
I couldn’t resist, “Maga, she’s at least 1.5 times fatter than the last time I saw her! And, it’s been less than an year!”
Another one said, “Oh maga, u dint know? She got married about 6 months back. See that white dumass next to her, he’s her husband.”
Me : I’m sure that he must have been smitten when he saw her last year. but now, i dont understand how she became so fat!
Another guy : Happens maga. Look at all the concave chicks around here. If you get a chance to look at them couple of months after their marriage, you’ll wonder how they’ll manage to become convex within a span of an year.
Me : Good that I did not propose to her. What if she’d accepted! I’d have become a khalasi!
So, girls bring this mystery along with them as well! I’ve seen such physiological mishaps happening earlier too. Girls having stop-in-your-tracks looks before marriage becoming fatter gradually after. As a kid I had a few neighbors who got married in quick succession. Gradually, they were becoming fatter, usually gaining prominently after every conception. But even then, it’d take at least 2 years (at worst) to blow up to 150%. What stumped me now was the speed at which it was happening. Barely a year and we get to see this. My heart goes out to all such husbands who were imagining life with a beautiful partner and getting lost in the marital bliss. But seeing warnings like this flash out sends shivers down my spine.
So, back to wedding hall, us friends got back to the chick-hunting. But this time, we were conscious about every choice we made. No body was sending out signals which would confuse the girls that we’re showing undivided interest. Every time we found an eligible candidate, we used to get into hushed discussions about the possibility of the my-wife-is becoming-(very)-fat-after-marriage syndrome.
Salient points of our discussion :
If she is chubby now, she’ll become fat later. For Sure.
If she’s running around and active, the odds of sitting in one place and accumulating weight is less.
Check out her mother. No No, dont get me wrong. We were just trying to understand the family history to estimate the possibility of a blow-up. You know, nipping the bad bud in early stages.
Check out her father also. This one is just a safety precaution. You never know whom the girl inherited more from!
Try to figure out what she eats and how much.
See if and how she is talking to people, if interacting well, whether conscious about her beauty even before other females. That way we could get an idea whether she’d take care of herself, relying on the envy that she’d generate among other “competitors.”
Before we could discuss more, (and possibly write The Book of Love part 2) we had to head back to our homes. Even though we were scared of the possibility of the aforementioned eventuality, we were content with the informal swayamvar that we were treated to.
