Fail Attempt

   Of course, I should have realized like ages ago, that I was simply trying too hard. The levels of pretentiousness a person can get away with on facebook and in the real world are way, way different. It's okay to execute horribly distorted, cropped and very provocative statements punctuated with periods instead of commas like "Roxanne. Fail." or "Lame. Disgusting." and escape with it on fb. Does not happen in the real world, my friend.
   I had just seen Shaitan (A mucky story about messed up tweens) and was simply stuck blind by it's 'badassness'. I loved the movie so much, that for a few days, I was into the 'profound' and 'deep' thoughts it tried to provoke and the mirror it held up to society. I kept on harping about it (much to my sidie's frustration) about how it was a cult movie and how Bollywood had suddenly grown up. The point was, I got too carried away and did not realize that movie was supposed to be watched with a pinch of salt and not scrutinized, simply because it was something that was not intended to be mulled over. In any case, I badly wanted to tell my friends at Chennai and Trichy about the film, and look cool about it. I sent an sms, "Shaitan. Win." (Read Soul of Wit below)
  I repeat, I wanted to look cool by being all internet jargonish about it. We all do.
   The advantage with facebook is that if one does not understand a particular, provoking wall post, one can simply ctrlC, ctrlV the same onto a new tab and let Google do the explaining. It's not the same with cellphones. It was simply stupid of me to hope for any sane person with a Cerebrum to understand the bloody sms.
   Well, the end result was that I got a taste of my own medicine. The replies were as brief, as cold and as cool as the jab, ranging from "What?" and "Hmm?" to "K" and "Kk".
   Friends, they keep you on Earth...

Carnival of Rust

  Went to the Pilani Mela about a week back. We usually take a few juniors along, juniors who have been hitherto cribbing about missing city life. I did.
   But first, about the annual Mela. Located about a mile away from the campus and earmarked by that huge Shivji statue beside it, are the grounds which play host to this very 'vibrant' and 'colorful' (hmm...) fair which happens once a year. As one enters the place, one is greeted by graying ( and rather grubby) Mickey Mouse heads bobbing in the air, part of a huge slide made of inflated rubber for small kids, manufactured with the sole aim of making fun of people of short stature.
Hey Pavan, I think you can are allowed on that slide. You're short enough.
   After Pavan bleghed his ass off, we all proceeded to the best ride of the lot, the break dance. The whole of last year, 'brak dance' terrified the living daylights out of me. Now with the correct spelling and a fresh coat of paint (Actually, no.) the ride still looked puke-addictive. Now I'm no chicken, but there is a limit to the number of centrifugal vector additions my extremely motion-sickness prone body could take. Apart from the tilted axis of the whole base, the seats are allowed to swivel around at blinding speeds, leaving you gasping for breath and clutching your ponch. The juniors took it well, some girls going even twice. Oh, the emasculation of it.
   Then, there's the "Mauth Ki Khuan", literally translating to Well of Death. As the Pilani DJ(?) puts it, they have 16 year old professionals who are not afraid of death, riding a motorbike and a Maruti 800 round and round the creaking walls of the 'well' as we stood in awe from above.  
   Speaking of creaking, I would like to mention that most of the amusement rides here were probably built for G. D. Birla a hundred years back, and the management decided to trust in god to keep the rusting, crumbling structures from total implosion. One would mistake the Mela for the sets of Final Destination 5.
  But the most beautiful part of the damn Mela is not the rides or the shops or the multitude of a myriad collection of shops and sweets and bangles. All about the experience you know.
Profoundness in 3... 2... 1...
   I walked in, 18, cribbing about this village and how it's got absolutely nothing to offer. I turned a kid, 7,  on seeing the rides and how much more fun they were, with friends.Then there's the motley assortment of people from other nearby villages. Old men in Dhotis and wearing Rajasthani Turbans, their wives ambling behind them, slightly servile in attitude, young (local) girls in Churidhars with their brothers jumping about, excited just to be there, married women shopping for their households, young coots in low waist jeans. They were all very happy, with this. They didn't need the consecrated walls of concrete and steel to keep them content.
 Happiness is relative. You just have to set your zero low enough.

Politics

  The existence of this annual debate held in the auditorium for the candidates contesting for Prez and Gen-Sec to present their points and to 'reach out' to the junta has always held my serious reservations. If you can't speak English coherently, you lose, even if you have a brilliant manifesto. Me being fiercely non-political, I went to the Audi Ragging session yesterday to watch some ass whooping by the Election Council. The blunders committed by the EC notwithstanding, I managed to catch a few laughs. Usual Chom vs. Gult politics only.
   Forget home, where people are idiots. The writer has always held the strongest and proudest of views that the Tamil community has always shied away from politics and didn't give a shit about who was being elected at BITS. Strength lies in numbers and numbers isn't exactly one of my state's strong points here. Yesterday though, weakened that opinion. My friend the Sudhan, suddenly appointed himself campaign manager for the female gen-sec candidate and begged us to cheer for her, just because he was 'in' Hindi Drama Club, which she was a member of. He was so charged up during the debate that he forgot to have dinner, leaving me flabbergasted. If there's one thing I've learned about him, it's that he never misses a meal, even if he's not hungry, as he "might lose energy."
I will write about that another day. Politics does weird things to people.   

Excerpts of Independence

First things first. An apology to all ju's who felt dissed. I should have probably written something anti-Semitic. It seems a lot 'cooler' to do that and draws less flak anyway. (Kidding, I love Gates and Zuckerberg)

Another Independence Day. Another parade missed. Another good lunch expected. Another Holiday.
I decided to do something different this time.The newspaper arrived. I had changed to The Hindu from Times of India this sem because it was the more sober of the two and I felt cool about being part of the intelligentsia who read The Hindu.

It was a bit too sober this time. In an article titled "A Fractured Freedom",

"... And yet - in vast stretches of antique teeming land - darkness, uunfreedoms and despair persist. On farm lands, sweat shops, brick kilns and mines, men, women and children are compelled to toil for dirt wages...Artisans, weavers... in penury....Caste... Countless more (freedom struggles) to be won... "

Was damn depressed dude. Was even more depressed by the fact that a few days later, like all other news, I would forget about it. So I went an read an Aussie Indian ex-batch-mate's blog (?).

"...market-based economy and extensive foreign direct investments have propelled India’s standing to fourth in the world in terms of Purchasing Power Parity as stated by the International Monetary Fund. Our government has deployed a variety of measures to encourage economic growth from with by lowering tariffs, import duties and dropped tax rates..." 


Sometimes, I just don't get them pseudo-economist bloggers.
   Just so that I don't look like an idiot in front of the reader, I did understand everything written and was actually delighted to read it and felt damn proud to be a true blooded Hindustani. Then I had a brilliant lunch at the mess (Like a BITsian), prepared by the poor devils who work harder than anyone else on holidays.


To more than anyone else, Happy Independence Day, Mess Folks.


PS: There was a blog about them juniors before this. My dad made me remove it.

Death of the Email Forward

Winehouse. Dead.
    Celebrity deaths leave me in a soup. There are these die-hard fans who mourn like hell and cry and make a scene. The black. There are these non fans who don't give two owl hoots about Amy Winehouse and are content with their Punjabi hip hop. The White. The pseudo connoisseurs of "World Music" (Me included) have listened only to one song, "Rehab" and liked it immensely. The grey.  What do I do?
   I update my fb status, conveying deep condolences and wait hungrily for likes.
   Before you judge the writer for making light of a poor woman's annihilation into the after life, you can't deny she brought it upon herself with that incessant drug habit of her's. Sad. (She did join the Forever 27 club though. People are literally dying to join that club).
   Being a real ignoramus in the realm of Internet trends (As the last post demonstrated), I continue to dish out observations without any research as.... research. I'm not much of an email forwarding person. I archive whatever I get, see them vanish in a silent whoosh and bask in the contentment that I just occupied a few more Megabytes of them Google Hard drives.
   I don't get forwards anymore.
  Is it just some "I don't send you 'cos you don't send me" thing or have users actually gotten bored with forwarding emails? The writer harks back to the days of "Forward or Yahoo! will delete your account" and (With all due respect) "Two day old Jessica has Paraneoplastic Syndrome. Forward and AOL will contribute 10c".
  One would  naturally blame Zuckerberg and StumbleUpon for this. Found a website interesting? You put it on your wall and 'earn' likes (or +1s, Sheesh). Found a cute little Internet Meme about wannabe nerdo school girls? Put it on G+ along with your trademark #hashtag. All this criticism notwithstanding, the reader would've most probably visited this post through the link on my fb wall. What kind of a hypocritical world is this?
  My hols are drawing to an unholy end and I am praying to god that I don't develop withdrawal symptoms towards the extremely, extremely sedentary lifestyle I've been leading at home.
  Off to Pack. Over and out.   

Soul of Wit

   Yes, this is going to be one of those horribly pretentious (not to mention boring) 'observations-of-society-by-an-enlightened-intellectual' posts. So save yourself, before it's too late.
A few disclaimers first:
   The control group was very small, just a few college mates. Others significant factors blatantly ignored. Bad economics, overall. But who cares? It's my ducking blog.
   Let's rewind the clocks a bit. Blogger (The blogging site) was launched by Pyra Labs in 1999 and later bought by Google in 2003. Facebook let go of its snooty "For ivy leaguers only" tag in 2004. Yahoo! acquired Flickr in 2005 and Twitter arrived in 2006. Stumbleupon though started in 2001, hit ten Million users by 2010.

Anything click?

Here's more. The average blog reader stays a nice 96 seconds per blog. You are a facebooker. You tell me how much time you spend on someone's profile, status update or a photo album. Unless one is a connoisseur who admires the 'nuances' and 'inner depth' involved in photography, one is not going to spend more than 12 seconds on a photo (I'll get to the captions later). Twitter allows only 140 characters. And if you're a stumbler, you'd have realized the point the writer's trying to drive home.
   Let's talk about two things, status updates and photo captions. Not just normal 'We are Pardayying!' photos but the aesthetic, professional worthy-of-Photog-club ones which a few friends of mine post regularly as well.
  Status messages of school goers were usually a long affair, starting with a quote or saying, then blowing it completely out of context and ending somewhat stupidly with an indifferent reference to acads or parents.

"Ncessty s da mothr f invnshn. Ma mothr joind fb. ztkfi del my acc?? Wt do i do??? :P:D:):|:( "  (Two years ago)
"Damn... hate examz...." (One year ago)
"Dang." (Now). Other examples: "Roxanne", "Inis Mona" and "Sheesh". (Don't ask me what they mean.)


     Photo captions by few school friends of mine were longer too. They felt the need to explain the pains taken, the result in mind and the means to achieve those ends. Then they became a line from the lyrics of a never-heard-of song. Now they're just one word. "Corrosion" (Describing a rusted gate), "Headspace"(Palm trees billowing in the wind) and "Diablo"(A black man in three-fourths taking a drought). Just one word.

Brevity.
  The writer stands vindicated, when they declared to the world that companies are "capitalizing on the younger generation's increasingly decreasing attention span." As supply of content (Statuses, photos, wall posts) increases, demand (Read attention span) decreases and therefore sentences began to get shorter to keep the demand going. Intelligence is being curt. Brevity is now the soul of it, pun intended.
  This will help clear the air in case you're yet to be convinced. Internet Memes. Very Short, very Sharp and very, very sexy. 
Convinced?
  This does not mean you run to your broker and ask him to buy up as many shares of that brand new internet social site where users can post and comment in only one word. And later sue me when the bubble bursts. In case you haven't noticed, I just disproved my theory by writing a 500 word post and keeping you glued till the very end. Worship me.

Whoa

Thousand Hits. Thank you.

Slum Road

  The Scooty Pep+ sped on, making note of the piling traffic ahead. A slow drizzle started, wetting his spectacles as he took a short-cut into a narrow, tar road situated in a slum area. He slowed down a bit.
  Thatched huts, all fighting to get a little more of the road to encroach upon. Extremely small doors that you would have bend double to get through. Loudspeakers every 50 meters or so, blaring Shlokas. Ladies and girls standing outside a Syntex tank to receive their Kodam of water for the day. The quintessential politician's poster, with a politician walking, clutching the hem of his veshti, politician smiling, politician talking on his cell phone. Below were smaller pictures of the constituency representatives, hooligans, gangsters with outrageous side-burns. The posters of Prabhakaran the LTTE chief, were there about a year ago. They had been removed now. The drizzle slowly stopped.
   And the children! Their innocence still preserved, the road their second home. Teenagers with audacious low cut cheap jeans playing marbles, five year olds with plastic toy cars, dark skinned girls playing that hopping game, all on the road. Others ran off into roads that snaked in and out of the area, cars screeching to a halt behind them.
  The scooty slowed down to a crawl. The hands that rode it were alert, lest some child came running across unexpectedly. It stopped. There was a row of small stones kept on the road, a cheap barricade. He looked ahead.
   Up ahead stood a stage, propped with thick wooden sticks, six feet high, on the road. On it were miniature bulbs, the ones used in decorative lighting, connected with wires, which twisted and twirled to light up a huge Parvathi Devi. Further ahead was the temple, packed with devotees attending the Pooja. He smiled. He should have paid more attention to the loudspeakers.
  He considered squeezing through whatever bit of road was left. Beside him, old men on plastic chairs gave a knowing smile.  He turned around. Slum dogs, he muttered. The scooty traced back and sped into another world, a world it was more comfortable with.
  The slummers carried on, oblivious to him and the world surrounding them.  

Goan Learning Curve

    It's like the hand of God(A rather mischievous one. I'm guessing that brat Krishna) shoved in and turned his sand pit upside down, exposing the city's rather dark underbelly. No, 'dark underbelly' is not a metaphor for some non-existent mafia or it's nexus with the cops here. Literally, the whole city is being dug out, whether it is for Metro rail construction in 100 feet road or for storm water drainage in T Nagar. It's not like roads were world class or anything, but hey, at least you could spot a bit of black tar here and there, reminding you that you gotta pay road tax for it. Right now it’s time to test that Scooty's off-roading skills, eh?

   Was speaking to this BITS, Goan(Oops, BITS, Pilani, K.K. Birla Goa Campus) about how his first year had been. Generic answers. Either he’s bored or showing attitude. Attitude. Must stem from somewhere. So I decided to stun him with my level of exposure about internships. (The level being I know that people are going for internships in their first year holidays itself. Worship me.)

Uh, oh, HUGE learning curve ahead...

Me: So, you thinking of any internship options? (You can almost taste the smugness the air reeked of...)

Him: Already went for one. Lasted a few weeks…

Me: Oh. (Thank god for Facebook chat. He didn’t have to see me do the Kangaroo hop around the room, mouthing out muffled expletives and curses at myself…)

   The next hour was spent kissing ass and asking him where and when he went, how he got it and what exactly he did there. Sheesh. The next day was spent asking dad about them and applying for one. The following days were spent eating at Subway, Pizza Hut and Rajdhani respectively and sleeping for 8-10 hours, convincing oneself that ignorance is bliss, only if you’re ignorant of the fact that you’re ignorant.

Leftover Clocks

    The complete and resounding success of the previous post A Dream inflated an already bloated ego of the writer to the limit, thereby pushing him into an era of complacency, laziness and apathy, and resulted in nothing less than the forgetting of consecutive birthdays of two women very dear to him. Jolted out of my permanent supine and almost comatose(This thesaurus thing is awesome) posture, I begin to dish out more and more crap.
   Well, the prolonged summer, the even more prolonged summer holidays(more than two months), the scorching heat and humid weather, the power cuts and rolling blackouts, the soaring Petrol prices and House MD are to blame. My brain has stagnated, bored to death and has run completely out of ideas. Should have joined that German language class at Max Mueller Bhavan my dad was telling me about.(The definition of Aryan racism is throwing up red squiggly spelling error lines for Bhavan while Max Mueller sir gets a clean chit...)
    All of us friends met up at Creamy Inn, an Ok ice cream joint in Anna Nagar to discuss what the first year in college had done to us. The IITians and wannabe IITians huddled together, discussing internship prospects(After only a year in college), how low the sex ratio was, coding(Doesn't matter even if you're in Naval Architecture, everyone discusses coding) and other stuff which went way over my head the moment the chatter started. Us mere mortals, crept around, talking about how our brothers who were now in the vicious circle of school and JEE coaching were doing. Mere mortal talk.Well, other mundanely interesting things also crop up.

Me: I left a few things in my room while packing by mistake. Damn, I forgot my door mat!
Sid: I had a few problems too. When I came out, I noticed I was late for the train and left in a hurry. Retrospecting, I thought, "How did I notice I was late?", and answered myself, "By looking at the clock".
Me: And where was the clock?
Sid: In my room! Almost missed the train in running back to get it.
Gautham: Shit. I forgot mine!
        
      It doesn't matter which college you go to, as long as you have friends who lighten your heart and keep you laughing, I guess.