The Hol Blog 2

     I'm shit bored here, man. The first week of holidays was spent in eating. Like. Hell. I also met a lot of friends and finally delivered the Mridangam to a senior's mom for repair and maintenance. Now I am spending time with the cat, which sleeps all the time and reading The Fall of Giants. The book, as I said is amazing.
     Now blasting Ensiferum(Exotic tastes, people, exotic tastes, read The Hol blog 1...) in my room. A beautiful thing about Indians is that thy neighbor is never troubled, at least he acts as if he's not, by the decibel level of thy music, 'cos
    1. He's too lazy to stand up for his rights as an Indian, preferring to curse and whine and gripe about you rather than knock at your door.
    2. He had been doing the same thing to you a few days back and is resigned himself to the fate that he's paying for his sins...
    The music is just a metaphor for those little, but not so little things which your neighbor does to upset you, like keeping a dog which is a barking alarm at two in the night, dumping his garbage in front of your gate, buying non veg from the road sellers(This, coming from a non vegan, but it attracts flies and stinks and the hawker putting his hand inside the fish's mouth.. ew!), having an AC which has a leaky nose and a liking for your head...
     The worst neighbor is the Cheapass neighbor. The neighbor who washes clothes in the terrace because he doesn't want to waste his own water, uses the common plug point to run all his electrical appliances. That's worse than having a friend who eats at your mess and increases your food bill. Am I touching some nerve here?
     I checked my mail and saw that there was this mail thread linked to ideas for Sangamam 2k11. Thats the classical dance show of Raag for the second semester, usually based on a story or a theme. Holy shit, some of the ideas were wonderful. Professional. A little twinge of guilt here, having not offered any ideas myself. Ajay(The prez) is going to kill me...
    I also want to talk about the wonder woman and lobbyist Niira Radia. Not about the scams she's involved in. That's already going on full blast(Or, is it? Newspapers aren't willing to lose ad revenue from our dear Ambanis, are they?) in the media. All I want to do is offer a 21 gun salute to the daring nerve this woman has had in putting up our democracy and India as a republic up for sale, right from selecting portfolios to ministers, cozying up to the biggest names of corporate India to bloody deciding what newspapers should publish. Yep, that's the parliament and the Freedom of Press taken care of. Anyone for telling me what else democracy means?
   Mom's getting me a lappy for the next sem! Will use it only for slides...
  

The Hol Blog

Back after a hiatus!

    Well, Im not in the IPC right now. The semester ended on the 14th of December, reaching(and ending) a crescendo of end sem preparations, as I lived in the library and struggled to convert whatever mid-sem 'D's and 'E's to justifiable 'C's and respectable 'B's.. I just might manage a B in thermodynamics, in fact... Whoa!

     What a semester it has been! An overwhelming experience, joining college, learning freedom, right from registering to making your timetable and having a room for yourself(The latter might have figured in my poor grades, but take lite...), 'interacting' with seniors, BITSian bdays, DoPy, Raag, ARBITS... Awesome... 
    Cant speak the same for my acads though... I realized yesterday that I'm the only six pointer among my 12th grade classmates, who are 8 and above... Kinda sickening... Blame it on my college, where an average is given a 6 instead of a 7 or an 8...Will study like hell next sem, damn...
    I also want to make an interesting point on my blue blooded insti's blue blooded character. The temperature touched a non thermodynamic zero two weeks back in Pilani and the next day I see some profs still wearing their immaculate starched shirts and t-shirts and jeans, nothing more, nothing less! This is the limit of institutionalization! Just because you live in a place that has a temperature range of 55K doesn't mean your blood stops regulating body temperature... You can't be that cold! (Anymore sentences with implicit meanings or metaphors and I just might be thrown out...)
    The train journey home was as beautiful as ever. I would live in a train, given the chance. My favorite sophomore Venkatramanan's status describes it nicely, "the steady clickety-clack of steel wheels on polished rails...", ah, music to the ears... I love the way tracks 'merge' and divide as though they were composed of silk threads...  The way, the world's largest institution seamlessly functions as a unit, right from laying the concrete slabs to the fish plates to the catering...Did you know that the Indian railways also caters to the Parliament? No wonder our babus are so bloated up... Till now I thought it was the moneybags.. Also makes you wonder about the people who sit on the railway tracks or the A-holes who blow them up in protest for some mundane cause... Anyone for running trains over them? 

           Heavy stuff apart, me and my friends went to Barbecue Nation yesterday and ate the waiter's(Yes, the waiter's) heart out, so much so that the poor devil begged us to try the main course also instead of sticking just to the starters... I don't think I'm gonna be eating out for weeks... Amazing food.. We all felt guilty and also generously tipped them too...
      In my college, A person's cool quotient(supposedly) increases greatly if he or she has exotic tastes in books, movies and music.
   Tanmoy: Hey, have you heard of Eluveitie?
          Me: Nope, what is it?
   Tanmoy: They are a band from Europe..
          Me: Genre?
   Tanmoy: Folk, Celtic metal...
          (Hmm.. Celtic refers to the six Celtic nations of Brittany (Breizh), Cornwall (Kernow), Ireland (Éire), the Isle of Man (Mannin), Scotland (Alba), and Wales (Cymru). Yep, thank you Wiki...)
              Me: Nice, how are they?

   Tanmoy: Awesome shit, yo... I listened to them two days back and I didn't sleep yesterday 'cos I was       high on them... 

          Me: Nice, will try listening to them...


   There you go... Tanmoy is a nice friend of mine, but sometimes, I can't even recognize the author or the director of some of the books or movies he mentions. Well, he isn't in Matrix(The book and movie review club) for no reason... Keeping up with the peer pressure, I decided to read Ken Follett's "Fall of Giants". The book is going good, about World War I or something...  
    Anyway, I have to deliver a mridangam to a senior in Cathedral road, about 6.5km of bad roads, traffic snarls and teeth munching away from my house...
     Will keep the reader posted...
PS: Eluveitie is from Switzerland. Love you Wiki..

Diwali Blues

   Diwali is round the corner and I'm watching Chodu CID on my cell. Well, the wing is quite empty and my best friend Achyuth has left for his beloved homeland Hyd. Hopefully, he'll bring some good sweets from PullaReddy's when he comes back. Most of us are clinging on to our friends here in the mutual hope that they bring a bit of civilization (Thank you for the McD burger, Shravan sir) whenever they come back from wherever they went. It would be chaos otherwise, like an Alice Cooper concert.

   All the buildings have been decked up with colorful decorative lights and the clock tower looks magnificent. Ive bunked all the classes for the past two days, not that they taught anything worthwhile anyway, so megalite... (Megalite is a nice piece of pilani jargon which can be used pretty much like the f word - noun, adjective, verb, you name it...) Also, am jamming with raag again for an instrumental concert. Full fledged practice might begin tomorrow. Hurray.

   I've also noticed that my vocabulary, grammatical accuracy and general command over the English language has been on free fall since I have no idea when... I've already said that I write crappy blogs with a dictionary and google for help. I was usually known for my language skills at least till 8th grade, where my teacher asked the class to give me a big hand for an essay or something. So it comes as a big shock to me when I didnt know the meaning of "aficionado" (Yes, I had to google the spelling, don't rub it in). Blame it on all the mind numbing, brain killing, creativity sucking IIT coaching for the past two years. All I can remember are formulas, and more formulae... Back to the drawing board.

  Have I bored the reader enough? Wishing him/her ("it" if its Zaphod Beeblebrox) a very happy and flollopy Diwali... Have fun...

Insomnia

   Oasis'10 just got over. It is the one chance in a year where I get to blow 500 bucks(And mind you, that's frugal) in four days and not feel guilty. It is the time for the girls to bring out the short skirts, time to get local anesthesia below the ass to ignore the cold and time for head banging. Its also time for me to become a walking billboard for my blue blooded institution... Didn't attend many events though... Just Rocktaves(Which was a bit sleepy but fun in the end), the Bhayanak Maut concert(Which was THE Shit) and the Motherjane one too(Which was proper fun)... Vishal and Shekhar were awesome too...
    Life is almost back to normal now. My biological alarm had to adjust a bit, wake me up at 8 and crap by 8:30..  Just attended a class and was quite surprised to all see the profs pretending that they had been to put to temporary sleep for four days and nothing at all had happened. Don't think they would want to waste 10 minutes asking how Oasis was, and enduring the ensuing  roar... Megalite.
   One thing I realized in college is that people are identified by either their department or club or both. A typical conversation goes like this:
 Achyuth: Hey, where you coming from?
        Me: Surya Raman's room. Had to get some stuff for him..
 Achyuth: Surya Raman who?
        Me: Backstage...
 Achyuth: Oh... (Grins)    
     People love to form opinions and preconceived notions  about a person based on his department or club. I'm supposed to be a ghot because I'm in Raag(Which is as far away from the truth as Betelgeuse) and a boozer 'cos I'm in ARBITs(Which again mom, is not true..)  What crap man...
 
   I haven't slept well for the past few days... Just been lazing around, tossing and turning in my bed(Insomnia is not not sleeping.. Insomnia is trying to do an all nighter, chucking it and trying to sleep, and not being able to because you slept in the afternoon  because you had decided to do an all nighter...)
   I have also realized that hygiene, healthcare and personal wellbeing gets murdered and thrown out of the window once you start college... Haven't eaten a single fruit, haven't cut my nails, haven't read ANY books since I came here... The only good thing is that I have managed to take bath everyday(Which is quite an achievement besides being a teetotaler and a non-smoker)
   Man, this blog is boooring... Will come up with something better next time...

Beginnings

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     I had already given up on my cellphone by then. This little bit of new age techno wonder had left me frustrated as I tried in vain, leaving me wounded but a bit wiser... We aren't emancipated from computers, not yet. Those huge guys singing the Blackberry song will have to wait...
     If you havent understood just yet, the GPRS in my cellphone couldnt handle the massive amounts of data required to be upoaded and downloaded to create a blog... Poor fellow just passed out.
     So here I am, in the IPC, trying to rack my brains up to find that little and long forgotten department in my brain which was supposed to handle creativity and English and memory. Little 'cos it hasnt seen much activity in the past 2-3 years and long forgotten because of a phenomenon called JEE coaching.
     As a third year senior and English Press Club Ed Arnob Hazra sir puts it, Welcome to BITS, Pilani, the land of technocrats and Shikanji addicts(And no mom, Shikanji is a cool drink, nothing more), where brains are dumbed down in the running from and to the LTC, the faculty departments, the ATM(which is usually empty), the messes(where food is okay) and occasionally, the bhawans (And I shudder to think what's going on in the IITs, 'cos Bits ranks first in 'Overall personality Development', whatever thats supposed to mean... Still, nothing to beat MoodI and Saarang...)
     Well, what keeps me going in this place? The Dept of Photography(DoPy) is a nice place to hang out at.. Take the steam out while we listen to music(Good Music) and do some work, and the Raag room, where the pot jamming sessions take place. It's not a lot cooler than its sounds 'cos hey, you dont find many ghatamists who have also managed to flunk the JEE, pull their socks up for BITSAT and have a father in NITT, so that they cant go there... GOD, I'm unique!
      Time is 5:15pm now and i get  the familiar "Pplo..." message from poker.
Oasis starts from tomorrow...
Insomnia. 
    
 

Disclaimer

I'm a guy who dishes out crappy blogs with the help of a dictionary beside him, just for the heck of it. But dont even expect the English part to be perfect. It's a cruel world out there. You better survive.