Gorbachev turns in his grave

Internet trolls, while being incredibly stupid, geeky, disgruntled, forever-alone, sexually deprived, butt hurt dwelling bachelors most of the time, do spring up a witty retort once in a moon landing, taking you completely by surprise. While surfing Reddit, I came across an interesting Ask Me Anything (AMA) session with a former Red Army Sergeant who was stationed at a Siberian prison camp from '71 to '73 and later defected to America. While taking normal questions about people escaping the camp (and later being found frozen to death in the woods. Mother Russia, you scary) and general opinions about the US ('Cos rednecks have to talk about their country, even if it is to a ruskie), the conversation invariably led to Gorbachev, the man who broke up the Soviet Union. 

The long and short of it was that our agent did not like Gorbachev, which was expected. Russians have always been slightly confused about him. You don't throw away eighty years of intransigent Communism overnight). He lamented that he "couldn't blame anyone for being an asshole" because they were "all dealing with the one big asshole in Moscow, and that one big asshole was screwing all of us in one way or another."

Funny, taking the case of a patriot who had just given such a passionate discourse would be the last, most tactless thing to do; which means that it would be first on the Troll's list. The world is an evil place. My worst fears were confirmed when I clicked to load more comments.

"In Soviet Russia, assholes screw you."

Brilliantly played, sir, but you're still going to hell. And so am I, for laughing until my sides ached.
The whole session was a brilliant read. 

http://tinyurl.com/9qthkc8

Up next, something on Derek Bailey and a worthless art form worth tens of millions. (No, we are not talking about Cecilia's restoration of the Ecce Homo Fresco. Or are we?) 

Review

Stop crying about the Rise and Fall of the Third Knight. Nolan is already busy with his new project on how a man with short term memory loss becomes an overnight vigilante to get even with the twin magicians who stole his dreams while thinking about the number of ways in which he could grant Michael Caine a role.

The holidays are coming to an unsavory end, and I've ended up hating myself as usual, like when I start on a pack of Krishna Sweets Mysore Pak. The world deserves a bloody thrashing.

A lot of oaths to be muttered, completely forgotten about, rudely woken up to, and halfheartedly salvaged. To manage time better, to exercise more, eat fruits, stop the looming uptick of an exponentially increasing mess bill, you get the drift. 

To also come up with better posts, frequently. Read more books. To listen up all the badly recorded songs of Joy Division.To keep oneself up to date with the recent comings and goings of the internet. The latter comes with a 'Colon P'. 

Till then, here's a potato. And a review of Skrat's newest and most awesome album, Skrat in the Shed.

Do check the album and my review out. 

http://wp.me/p2xkZi-59

The Raunchy Joke book

This one from the archives, sixth grade hols I guess.

   The initial euphoria of finally acquiring library membership #1022  at Kumaran Lending Library had rendered me part zombie, with a number of the Goosebumps and Animorphs series' titles borrowed everyday. This fiery reading spree was partly fed by the crushing ennui that usually sets in around two weeks after the start of the hols and partly by a savage race to fill up the sections of my borrowing registry faster than Arvi did. While his tryst with Archie and  Sydney Sheldon had him burning midnight oil, my own with Robin Cook and Tintin led to increased strain and later, myopia.

    One particular evening when I had dragged myself to the library to try something different this time, I decided to borrow one of them joke books. I had already tried reading the ones available at home and there was a decent collection available at the lib. So happily getting a 'nice sounding' joke book, I made my way back and was just about to read it when mom noticed the title. "What book have you got?!", she asked, rather incredulously.

"It's a joke book, The Raunchy Joke book", I replied. 

"Do you know what raunchy means?"

 I shook my head. "Isn't it like crunchy, you know, 'Crispy one liner bites'?"

"Please go look up Raunchy in the dictionary. This is why I always ask you to use the dictionary. Your vocab is very poor..." and so on.

Later in Ninth grade, was relating the whole anecdote to the lunch break pals.When we were all exchanging lighthearted guffaws, one of them stopped short and pondered, "When did you say this happened, bro?"

"Sixth grade hols, I think. Why?"

"Um, and your mother asked you to look it up in the dictionary?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"Did you read the jokes?"

"Duh no, not after looking up the meaning. Now that I think about it, I stopped reading joke books altogether after trying my hand at 'Rugby Jokes' and not understanding a thing. Why, dammit?"

"Whoa. So your mother expected you to understand the meaning of 'raunchy' at sixth grade?"

"Well, I guess- What? Whoaa."

Respect, mom.

Blagging Again

" I went mad for a while, did me no end of good... The point is, you see, there's no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might as well give in and save your sanity for later."

          - Ford Prefect

This quote pretty much explains the semester that passed by, seemingly trudging on at first but terminating faster than a grindcore microsong. Forget college, holing up at home and running to a leather institute in Adyar everyday for a blasted 'internship' isn't doing me any good either. Not exactly the picture perfect holidaying, filled with guitar and Ghatam learning interspersed with photography and reading and other cool stuff I had imagined.

     Abruptly moving on, I find myself obligated to tell you that this blog underwent a major identity crisis a few months back. That, coupled with a chronologically well placed writer's block became an excellent excuse for some good ol' slacking off, bumming around, and generally being useless, so much so that even Guggu's CLRI inspired threat of skinning and curing me alive unless I picked the pen up fell on deaf ears.

   Oh, and why the identity crisis? Was reading blogs of ex-school/college mates to get new ideas and pass them off as my own. And for some reason I couldn't get past the title or the tagline. A few exhibits:

• Suyash's blog "Say Whaa..?" is "A bevy of thoughts locked up in a beautiful mind".
• Anirudh's "Blog about opinions" has "Snippets of thought from a brimming mind."
• Sreedip's myuntamedmind.wordpress.com, the blog being Doubts of a Wild Mind~! . 

You see what I did there? 
For days and days together, the brain was racked a lot of times, the five stages of grief were experienced and a lot of management techniques such as 'corporate renewal' and 'retrenchment policies' were applied to The Pot Jamming Sessions in order to give it a reinvention of sorts, try to reflect pseudo hipster stuff like the others. You know, profound and shit.

Ha ha... Yeah, right.

When asked what the unifying theme of his work Freakonomics was, the author Steven Levitt started blustering, to which a lot of economists jumped in and offered what they saw as the theme. This continued until the philosopher Robert Noznick interrupted. 

"How old are you, Steve?" he asked.

"Twenty-six."

Nozick turned to the other fellows: "He's 26 years old. Why does he need to have a unifying theme? Maybe he's going to be one of those people who's so talented he doesn't need one. He'll take a question and he'll just answer it, and it'll be fine."

See?

Of course, that anecdote was for people like Steven Levitt, a brilliantly talented Harvard graduate. Poor droids like myself, extreme lethargy is the best known cause for maintaining status quo. Therefore, I'm back to my usual ramblings, posting desultory, redundant satire on this minimally themed blog.  

On a happier note, it's good to be back, finally. Keep watching this space for more sessions.

Entry

(Entry for Cactus Flower 2012)

The Death Sales Pitch

                The Avantika Express whooshed by in the dead of the night, making itself clear that it was in no mood to stop at a station in such a deplorable state.  The station in turn showed the finger to it as it held its head high in the clouds, reminiscing about past glories and fresh paint, failing to accept reality. Near the station were clichéd, small, slum-like apartments in which sat slouched a person, one hand on his head and the other unconsciously scratching his forearm.

Questions and conversations filled this person’s head. The railway clock outside his window read 02:30. To take his mind off things, he tried a little game he’d learnt to play with himself over the years of being a loner (He did have his ‘friends’, yes, but they didn’t quite fit the bill, not his wavelength, no). He closed his eyes and held a glass frame to his mind, observing every thought which drifted past, but not becoming the thought himself. Words, colors and memories flooded the gates. He had grown up in the orphanage. The childhood he had lost, roaming with gangs. He had found refuge in drugs, moving on from toner solutions to pot to smack. He had dabbled with every vice before discovering the costliest, gambling. Gambling! It was a Romeo & Juliet love affair, and now Romeo and Juliet were being forced to kill each other here! A single tear traced his cheek and fell without a sound. He forced himself to think of something happy, but the trail of thoughts turned murkier.  

His hand went instinctively to the small bottle of rat poison on the small table. He cursed himself loudly. Not now, he said to himself, his creditors had given him until morning. There was no way he could come up with that kind of money though. He cursed himself again. He had given up. He wanted out.  I need to sell death to myself, he said. His short, failed stint at reforming himself as a salesman came back to him. He needed a sales pitch.

   He played some music, tried to take his mind off things. It did little help. He took an aspirin.

                It’s a good thing people die all the time and they’re bloody good at it too. Apart from the customary “life-karma-cycle” which usually follows death talks, it would be prudent to say this: That the world reflects a miniscule sense of sanity could be owed to the dear Reaper. Death keeps the living one terrified, scampering lot, salvaging little bits and pieces of life they have left. Those who are alive are in a permanent stupor, high on cheap carnal desires and accumulating wealth. As if they could bribe Yama! No, the living envy the dead, envy the fact that while they are left hopelessly walking about the Earth with no real objective, the dead, well what were the idiots up to anyway? Nobody knew. What a mystery.

 Humans fear death just like they fear darkness and its somber depths. What if the grass was black on the other side?

His hand itched. He needed another hit, but unfortunately he didn’t have any left. He needed to get away from the vicious cycle of hits and cravings and that enough seemed like a good reason. His eyes jerked again towards the poison. Outside, the Habibganj Indore Intercity express was courteous enough to stop at the station.

 A moment’s pause. His life flashed before his eyes again. He had two minutes. He took it.

Later, as he stood at the vestibule trying to avoid the TTE and look as inconspicuous as possible, he thought about the small bottle on the table. He smiled. Need to work on that Sales Pitch.

-          Prasannaa Venkatesh 

Snowdens of Yesteryear

GRE tip for the day (Not a regular thing, no):

   The word Satiety is the feeling or state of being gratified to or beyond capacity. Usually used in the gastronomical context, the word becomes sated when used in the verbal sense. This is of course a pain in the ass for grammar Nazis when people tend to use satiated instead of sated. Satiate is a synonym and looks to derive from Latin Satis which means enough. According to Merriam-Webster, "Satiate and Sate may sometimes imply only complete satisfaction but more often suggest repletion that has destroyed interest or desire. Surfeit implies a nauseating repletion. Cloy stresses the disgust or boredom resulting from such surfeiting."

   You are confused. Therefore, I'm sated. What happened to original thought, wit and humor? Where was that cloak of satire masking a deep sense of insecurity, along with one or two cracks at IITs that used to characterize The Pot Jamming Sessions? Why did I have to stoop to my very nadir and copy/paste from random sites about Satiate and Sate? In short, why so much plagiarism, you may ask. I'm just putting as much information as possible on the platter before them Wikipedians block out Wikipedia to protest against SOPA and PIPA. Its a veritable student's nightmare, blocking dear old Wiki. Sort of a trailer to the Apocalypse. The Mayans were right.

     David J Griffiths, US Physicist and educator, author of the much revered Introduction to Electrodynamics, BITSian icon, came over to give a lecture on 'What's so funny about quantum mechanics'. Crowds thronged the audi which was pretty packed a good half hour before the lecture began. Of course, you also had the doods who claimed "they bunked class even when the bloody author came to teach", therefore dispensing any allusions cast on their impeccable 0% attendance level. So cool they are, no?  

   The guy was given a rock star's welcome as he walked through the aisle, standing ovation and all. The wannabe racists that we were, a few friends and I tried to guess whether he was a southie or a Yankee from his accent. The conspicuous white mush and the weird 'condom-meganicks' pronunciation notwithstanding, we were unable to decide whether he was a redneck or not. He certainly didn't talk about no immigrants or about Tebow losing. He talked a lot about stuff I didn't understand but found very interesting.Weirder was the Q&A session with students asking him stuff about quantum mechanics which sounded very similar to Yossarian's "Why is Hitler? Who is Spain? When is right?". Maybe I was being deliberately retarded. Funny. 

Ghatam Street

   It had been almost two weeks since that painful journey in what they called a SpiceJet and almost a week since I had gotten used to walking barefoot in the house, feeling clean tiles, a welcome respite from the layer of dust and sand which usually covered my hostel room. Itching to discover useful ways of wasting time apart from the usual books and movie 'projects' which I had undertaken, most of which were past deadline, I decided to buy a new Ghatam.

   After making a few calls and inquiring about prices and doing a bit of asking around, facts came to light. The air-conditioned, upmarket music showrooms were owned by daylight robbers who sold Ghatams at ten times the price they brought them for. Not to degrade my instrument or anything, but it's only a clay pot, albeit one of a uniform texture, pitch and heat treatment but nonetheless, a clay pot. And if a Ghatam costs you an arm, a leg and pretty much your whole torso to buy, without Vinayakaram's autograph to show for it, you know the world is coming to a sad capitalist end.  
   To cut down on the cyphers at the end of the price tag, we headed to the very source, the 'factory' in Mylapore, where apparently existed a street with a dead-end. Every family on this street had once depended on the different shades of brown and the vastly diverse shapes clay could inhabit. As time wore on, the art was still passed from one generation to the next, but the money in it declined, and they were forced to seek  better paying jobs. A few vestiges of the profession remained, and only one family made Ghatams in that street.
   Small, freshly molded dark green toy pots laid out for drying by the hundreds, pots and strange looking vases immaculately being carved by swift and nimble hands which guided the clay as it took shape and of course, Ghatams of every size, thickness and Shruti, pitch were present.
   What stuck me as very strange was the whole 'architecture' of the buildings, built with absolutely no gaps in between. This particular dead-end street was slightly cut off from the usual Mylapore (For that matter, what is usual Mylapore? Stupid Area). Disproportionate buildings which ran high up were no more than four arm-stretches wide. We were led into a 'house' which wasn't very wide but was three floors high and ran as far as the eye could see! I later realized that they were actually many homes which were simply built with common walls like a slum, but very unlike one, as cement and bricks instead of tin and tarpaulin and plasma TVs instead of soot from burning wood adorned the walls! They were well-to-do families. The street was an economy on its own.
   As the husband was out working, the lady of the house displayed a few Ghatams on the floor as I sheepishly tested a few of them, having completely no idea how to select one. Picking two which sounded good and of appropriate size, we were astounded when the lady charged us almost thrice the amount we paid the last time. "We don't make them anymore. Only a handful of customers want Ghatams, so we have started outsourcing them from my uncle who lives in a village near Thanjavur." She refused to budge. We paid them, realizing that while the art of making Ghatams died out, a few families like this one had established a monopoly, naming any price they wanted to normal customers and music showrooms.
   We left, thinking about this uncle in Thanjavur and how old he could be (The lady was herself past fifty). What about after he...? Who would sell Madras Ghatams in Madras then? 

Them Dads

Been a month. Aiyyo.

Another semester. Another fun-filled semester of failed expectations. The writer cannot exactly recall much about the sem which just passed by, slowly and surely as the winter which tiptoes in through the backdoor, owing to his poor memory. (I still don't exactly know where we went for the DoPy trip, somewhere near Musssorie, or was it some Gunj?) Two of his wingies were slightly unnerved when they woke up in the morning to a knock on their doors and their fathers behind them. Don't exactly blame them, but who pays a surprise visit to their son's college early morning without the bleakest of excuses to show for it? It's not like the college is set in a sprawling metropolis for them to take a small 220 km detour anyway. ("Hey, son! Just checking out that new Adidas showroom for sweaters, so I thought I would drop by, you know. How you doing? What's that smell?"). If you're wondering, Pilani does have an Adidas with sab bilkul orijhanal peeces . Seems legit.

   That was not the point, anyway. So the dads minded their own business and we were all cool about it. So what if one of them could not sleep (owing to the nerve-wracking, gut-wrenching, blood-curdling screams of Yours truly) and told us off when we were 'celebrating' my birthday? So what if we had to slightly lower our music volumes and tone down our language and change the way we knock on doors and keep the corridor lights on during the night and speak in hushed tones around them and... stuff? We were pretty cool about it. Then it broke.

I woke up one bright morning, swung open my door and what I saw blinded me. 

The clothesline. It was, like, full, yo.

His dad had washed my wingie's clothes. All of them.

I took a peak at my mess of a room of a laundry basket. Clothes here, there, every-bloody-where. Here I was, undergoing continuous, back-to-back, crucifying laundry crises, biding my time, pushing off the day I would finally sit down in the cold, cold winter and do mine in the cold, cold water, and his dad pops up and  showers him with fresh-out-of-the-basket undies. Pardon my language. I'm raging because my dad just got me guitar when he paid me a (announced) visit.

Lucky Sethi. 

A Quadrode to America

Warning: A series of events not in correct chronological order. Am Tarantino, yo.

A long, long, long time back, when the price of petrol was hiked to 48 roobees...

"... Should do a tour at least once in the holidays..."

"...Hmm, there are around seven in Madurai itself..."

   I kept phasing in and out of the conversation, picking up bits and pieces of garbled information as buildings and vehicles crept past, a dull background to a frame which was the car window, distorted by glass, half raised. We were eating out that night, part of the unfortunate Saturday night routine, when virtually everyone in the city was out, replete with slow moving traffic, nightmarish parking problems and booked-full restaurants. Our family was a walking cliche, dad on the wheel while mom doing the backseat driving, passing parking advice and leaving dad slightly fuming. I suddenly sat up.

  "What's a Dhivya-Desam?", I asked. Resorting to a long, detailed explanation on the 108 'special' temples of Vishnu, the gist of which was the aforementioned, she ended with, "Srirangam is one. There are some 106 in India, I think. The other two are in...."

"America", I finished, for some reason. Slightly piqued, dad parried with an indignant "No. Heaven". 

"What's the difference?"

 The result was a very, very rare expression, something you usually freeze for the rest of your life...

Not so long ago...

"When do your exams get over?"

"14th or 15th, I think. Will check."

"When are you reaching Delhi?"

"15th or 16th, I think. We should reach Chennai by 17th or 18th morning. Or so".

"Why are you always unsure about everything in life?"

"Po Ma!"

"Cheri Cheri... Bring unopened or unfinished pickle bottles back. We'll finish them here."

"Hey, do you want Toblerone, Mars or Snickers? I get them in ANC. I could bring a few chocolates for Krish."

"Enna Pilaniya illa Americava? Have you paid your dues? Will I get your CG card..."

Long time back...

"You think America is all F.R.I.E.N.D.S? People sitting in a coffee shop, having a good time and discussing who has a crush on who? No way. This is why I don't like that sitcom..."

I nodded, then shook my head, just to be sure. I had completely no idea what was going on. Had seen only one episode of F.R.I.E.N.D.S. in life, and that too with no subtitles... Knew the soundtrack though...Sounded like my 'fav' Backstreet Boys. (I repeat, this was a long time back)

"America is not all fun man..."

(The rest of the conversation I don't remember, but it did mention something about high standards of living leading to house-cleaners arriving in SUVs and charging a bomb. It also mentioned not accepting things from strangers and burglar alarms and lots and lots of bubble wrapping their kids.You get the drift)

Yesterday...

"Dude, just saw both."

"Both? Zeitgeist AND Inside Job?"

"Yeah, man. Lost all faith in any standing institution. The Americans are pretty ducked..."

"Seriously"

 "But there was also this relief, that our own govt. is no way near being that organized in conspiring against its own people. (In the US, they want to secretly unify the American, Canadian and Mexican currencies into the Amero) Here we can only think of creating more and more states and districts. We can never think a century ahead. Even our ducking five-year plans are failing. A Zeitgeist is never possible in India."

"I was also thinking the same thing!"

"India, man. Win."

A DySoc Episode

    I attended a class in Dynamics of Social Change, which I and frankly speaking, no one had attended in the past three months except for that very loci looking loci girl who nobody talked to, except that even more loci looking loci guy. Not being exactly condescending towards the course (which deals with very abstract stuff most of the time) or locis, I'm not interested in both and had only gone to see the results of the report I'd turned in about a week back.

   So as fate would have it, the prof was talking about social disorganization and delinquency, how violence and anti-social activities are a result of nuclear, broken families and the cybernetic society and what not. He drew a chain: Nuclear families -> Loneliness -> Boredom -> Anti-social stuff. Forgive me for being alarmed, but this boredom was exactly the state I had been in for the past couple of months in this very boring semester. To cap it all, he mentioned, "You guys are living in the hostel, alone and bored. Suddenly a friend comes and says, "Hey, let's do something fun", and before you know it, you're doing something anti-social on the internet."

   I decided to attend all his classes from then on. I also decided to go to the temple that day. 

   Now before you fatalists jump to the worst conclusion at the drop of a LAN cable and conclude that I'm sitting for hours together in front of the dirty screen and wasting away my life blogging, here's a bit of background info.

   The mess secretary (or was it mess representative?) of VKB mess is my good friend APS, who won by a slim margin and brought in change. This also included 'progressive steps towards transparency and dialogue' like the creation of a facebook group for the same. What he did not foresee were the far-reaching consequences of trying to reach out to a lot of angry, depressed and dead  tongues. 

  The average second-yearite is filled with a lot of adolescent angst simply because he's not a tween yet and thinks people aren't giving him/her enough social recognition required of a sophomore. His tongue has also gone through various stages denial, anger and attempted suicide in the past year, reinforced with a lot of cliched mess jokes floating around. So as soon as one particular pissed-off average second-yearite posted, "APS you sucks!", it snowballed into a major dis-the-mess-rep competition on an open forum which our poor fellow simply couldn't handle. 

   Before you know it, this small grammatical error became a slogan of sorts, with people declaring a solemn "APS you sucks" instead of saying grace before having their food. If the food was extremely good, "APS you rocks" replaced it.

   An idle mind is the devil's workshop. Me and a few friends sat down and created an internet meme "for fun" with his photo. We also added "Went to mess. You simply sucks" and "Mess employees extra friendly? Mess food extra bad" and other diabolically thought-of captions for it, and shared it on DC, like textbook A-holes. It was an evil thing to do and the DySoc prof made us feel ashamed for it. Would I have done such a thing like that if I were in school? Nope. What were we thinking of anyway? Went and deleted the whole thing later.

PS: Sad part is, he wasn't even responsible for the food part but for general functioning of the mess. Very sad.

Happy part is we weren't that bored (Read anti-social) enough and didn't make the mistake of posting it on facebook. So nobody saw it. Whew.
PPS: DySoc is awesome dude.
PPPS: Still have a couple of memes left. Message me if you want!