Thursday, July 21, 2011

The sticky raging silliness

Allow me to ‘roll’ back to this same day a week back in time: Camping under an adolescent moon at Balu-ka-Ghera, a trek of 2 days on foot beyond the exploited hills of Manali. Allow me another 3 hours of rewind, and you will find us all crammed inside our little 2-man tent: the 5 of us tossing about in search of a warm, spacious foothold asshold to station ourselves permanently for the evening Panchayat, a war in verbiage, a war to out-cool each other; scraping away any baked beans or peanut butter we could find in their respective cans, to layer it on our bread slices and savour the only worthy taste we would find for most of our trek; the magnetic flux of whiskey bottle (Royal Stag) at my end drawing everyone closer, tempting us into opening its plastic lid; masala one-liners that seem to stimulate our tastebuds; illuminating misconceptions that would go into our travel accounts; banter without stop. There’s not much audience this evening for music, owing to blown-out aging JBL speakers, plus a narrow collection of music on the iPod – Sigur Ros, Kraftwerk, Beethoven, Delhi Belly, David Bowie, Dev D…

Out camping, there is little that vies for unique. It becomes a question of what separates us from a similar bunch of kids. In my imagination, every things stays: they drink in stealth, indulge in “vicious” banter (at least we kept things inside the circle of propriety), clown over the food, have a roll labeling the others ‘gay’ or ‘chutiya’ or ‘kaminey’; fill their diaries with similar dribble in retrospect.
To condense, however, are my hasty observations on our symbols of being one-up (or more like ten-up) that we bring to the table:
  1. Yogi’s social themes of discussion
  2. Sam’s discourse into the weird, the advance science, and the weird advance science
  3. Daaru's silence, that, eh, seems to be growing all the more mature
  4. O'Toole’s plethora of misinformation and worldly anecdotes.
  5. My laser prowess, disbelief into conjectures, and the playlists that nobody wants to listen to
There you go; each offering something unique that either comes with age, or hooks on with a longer lifespan, or just grows in size as one grows, to become distinct enough to be noticed and associated with oneself.

No comments: