
| Rank | Name | Score |
|---|---|---|
| I. | Mamta | 3+2 |
| II. | Madge | 3+3 |
| III. | Amara | 3+4 |
| IV. | Mwgli | 3+5 |
| V. | Tammy | 3+5 |
| VI. | Pamela | 3+6 |
| VII. | Meg | 4+0 |
| VIII. | Ana | 4+0 |
| IX. | Anamika | 4+7 |
On simple terms, exposing the world to my torturous jig. Suffer that!

| Rank | Name | Score |
|---|---|---|
| I. | Mamta | 3+2 |
| II. | Madge | 3+3 |
| III. | Amara | 3+4 |
| IV. | Mwgli | 3+5 |
| V. | Tammy | 3+5 |
| VI. | Pamela | 3+6 |
| VII. | Meg | 4+0 |
| VIII. | Ana | 4+0 |
| IX. | Anamika | 4+7 |


Having visited LR for 8-bit game cartridges, presently looking for an adapter to get my cell jack do a 3.5mm audio out. The roadside stall owner left for something urgent, leaving his kid in-charge, who got fascinated with my lesser-known cellphone, and eagerly snatched it away at my first hint of being comfortable parting with it - straight to the camera mode, a few clicks (the result of which you see) sans the curiosity for the outcome, then onto games and other features, which I suspected would ultimately lead to them enabling paid services... hence me snatching the phone back.
For once you see me not with the eyes of their eyes and speak to me not with the words they pieced for you. As terrible as you are, as unimaginative as you are, as goody goody as you never were, but it all works. There are things that stir, lips that form a smile, and a crescendo is reached midway - it could've worked no better, let me assure you.Hello to the saboteur of my panoramic lifestyle.
[we shake hands. I am reminded of “at laeva lacrimas muttoni absterget amica”]
I work in a haggard corporation that finds hard to produce an involving film in its mission to educate employees about the way they do business. Somebody should get paid to keep an attention span through such an abortion – a polished and sterile narrator, sterile suits in sterile environs sermonizing, and such affectation that can only hint at drug abuse (sans the fluidity and originality of thought). Between the bouts of sleep and the bouts of diahorrea, I barely manage to grasp the revelation that we are a customer-centric organization with a zealous streak to succeed and drive the market - that was new, I didn’t realize that earlier, I feel enraptured.
Seized by these flashing images of snow fields inside my head – not vast endless snow fields, but in patches, like after a light round of snowing, where the charred ground and mottled grass feature in equal proportions with the carpet of snow. That is the look most villages in upper Garhwal region would bear these days, when the locals desert their villages for more comfortable ones at lower altitudes (they live in a duality), and first snows of the season have fallen. Even their Gods descend down with them. Much of the snow – or old snow – I’ve come across has been of this variety. Yes, I do not get to play in it or eat it or make out with some girl wearing furs, but it gives you boundless reign of adventure. Thankfully, it’s no sea.
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Imagine a spacecraft of the future, with a crew of a thousand ladies, off for Alpha Centauri, with 2,000 breasts bobbing beautifully and quivering delightfully in response to every weightless movement . . . and I am the commander of the craft, and it is Saturday morning and time for inspection, naturally.I wish, for once, my Saturday morning would start with such hilarious inspections.
So it happens I had another unstable weekend, and it was exciting in the latter half, halfway-exciting in the former half, and somewhere in between the two jumps I lost a track of my life and lay googling, and ogling, and doodling. When you climb to the top of the mountain
Look out over the sea
Think about the places perhaps, where a young man could be
Then you jump back down to the rooftops
Look out over the town
Think about all of the strange things circulating round
I do my little ramp imitation as I walk back to my seat from the bay door; pronounced steps, a slight swagger; nobody takes notice, and my kick stays with me. Back on the seat, hunched, drowsy, confused, restless, wasted; you could kill me had you seen me rambling forward on the chronological axis in this state. Boss-gamma-mama tries taking interest in my assigned task for a while, and after a while of actually trying to explain him the task at hand, I simply hurl some tech jargon to see him scampering away. I love seeing people scamper away like that.
I barely invest my time in anything while in this corporate zoo. Even scribbling down seems tedious – it’s like the spirit of the working class enters my body upon an entry in the office, making me do all this ugly stuff that I don’t want to. My technical bent is a long lost brother now, a castaway from my own heart, like a king impeached partially by circumstances, much by guile, waiting with its forces outside the town for the day when it could claim its reign again. I doodle these silly things on my table desk (right now it’s a bad conception of Shiv Sena’s snarling tiger), conditional on access to a working whiteboard marker, rub them away, maybe write words in strange/skewed typefaces, or something in foreign language (Arbeit Macht Frei seems appropriate atm); I have lately ended up messing my trousers or those lighter coloured shirts with a stray marker trail.
In some time we are legally entitled to leave. "Well, we could. But we won't." The people around are on track to be voted the best vegetables in town; no insistence or convincing helps; an imitation war of sorts. I can feel a Silence of the Lambs in here...
- What did you see, Clarice? What did you see?
- Lambs.
- They were screaming.
- They were slaughtering the spring lambs?
- And they were screaming.
- And you ran away?
- No. First I tried to free them.
- I opened the gate to their pen, but they wouldn't run.
They just stood there, confused. They wouldn't run.
- But you could - and you did, didn't you?
If we were a pill, we’d have tangibly seen ourselves losing our character with the daily circular motion of the sun that sets our lives stirring, dissolving us faster and faster in the ether of humanity, till we all contribute a common consistency to the impotent chemical solution called life that nobody would ultimately drink for no great thirst to satisfy. It’d just spill over someday, perhaps… as insignificant a moment as our entire lifetimes have been (or will be).
Hiding behind the wall I could not see who was firing at me from the other side. I introduced some of my own fire from my M4A Carbine to get them into hiding, then tried to steal a look, and I did - there were two of them at the other side of the complex, themselves following a similar strategy as mine, and firing in short bursts, expecting to get lucky. I thought I could trump them with my knowledge of bullets having the power to get through certain walls at a certain angle…”wallbanging”. I fired again, several times, and my bullets tore through a chunk of wall.
Won't be long before I drift into my today's sleep; 0830 in the morning. Being irresponsible with your schedule is exciting; Juhu beach is exciting at dawn as well; so is Shruti's company. Already having come a full circle, rest of my waking hours would be spent trying to catch sleep; hard luck for me that life has such abundance to offer and yet we have to steal everything, including sleep, including our own expression. I also have this entity called 'office' where I'm supposed to spend time and get rich.
Was overcome with an unbearable tide of emotions by this evening. To my luck I could sneak away from the office sans a trace. Wiled time at R-City; then later, dismayed at the find that there existed no Shopper's Stop inside - I had free coupons to feed my materialistic minimality - I immediately employed a rickshaw to get me home. Melancholy took hold through the journey - I walked into my apartment in mere folds of flesh, there was a vacuum inside.
It would not be surprising to see why religion and arranged marriages go well. India is a shining example, a country that boasts of a "religious character". Marriage is a bond between two people. IT takes forever for two to know each other. What better than train them on the same framework, same decition-making guidelines, mo matter how flawed or historically inconsistent they are? Unless somebody can define themselves or sum their living in a word - eg Hindu, Muslim, Christian... - they cannot sell. Selling ourselves is what religion is for. Who cares how well people personally know each other, learn to guess the instinctive side of other's character? When there's a framework that the society (unjustly) rewards you for why be particularly unique, or try to find the perfect soulmate?
There was Marina, and her lover Ulay, who planned to make an example of their love, and decided to represent the coming together of two hearts unlike any other couple. The year was 1981.
Well, thanks to some help online, I would not be making my back any worse than what I presently have, which was as a result of fiddling with a few bikes in the garage to make space for parking.
This day was exhilirating, both sides of the cinema screen - a fledgeling story going on either side, and life mimicking the art that it sought out towards. I should count the day as epic, because never before have I indulged in cinema - the movie theatre types - to the extent of catching 3 first-day releases in succession in two different movieplexes. And it's been my first being chased by a nimbus cloud, hot on my heels. And also a first of sitting through an entire movie soaked in the rain caused by that cloud.Father's Day is fast approaching, and by coincidence, I am preparing for a trip to Nainital, where I’ll be with my father, who always migrates to the happier altitudes for the summers. Here’s something that I feel is a sorts of inheritance from the man.
Why do we travel? Or maybe the better question is, where does wanderlust come from?
I was thinking about the origins of my own travel curiosity and remembered my father's stories of traversing great distances, either as a necessity or out of impulse.
For a background, my grandfather was from a remote village in Kumaon called Guniyalekh, that lies a little beyond another slightly-lesser-remote village of Padampuri, in the district of Nainital. Family tragedies and the cause of employment had him settle down in Lucknow almost 80 years back. He kept his fascination for his roots alive by building a cottage in the quaint village of Gethia, not far from Nainital. Come the summers, Gethia would serve an ideal base-camp for visits to our ancestral lands that lay deeper in Guniyalekh. My father recalls the entire family travelling the distance in equal portions by bus, on mules, and on foot. Those were the days of denuded dirt tracks through forests and dangerous stream crossings, and I’m still surprised to hear of my grandma and my aunts’ courage and struggles to travel these distances. Being abused and seduced by the nature, all at once.
My father took a difficult resolution upon my grandfather’s death, that he would legally obtain rights to the lands – or whatever was left unoccupied of those – in Guniyalekh; the longing that lay in all hearts now turning into a hope, a hope that turned into expectations from my father. Having graduated in law, and choosing teaching for a profession, a man who spent much of his time extolling and preaching the ideals of ‘kanoon’, now set forth for the corruption-laden legalities of the real India. More than the legal procedure, it was the travelling involved that could make a person submit to defeat. After several trips between Lucknow and Nainital, endless juggling between Gethia, Nanital, and Guniyalekh, fighting the bureaucracy in Nainital, and death threats by selfish villagers who had their own plans of illegal acquisition in mind, he managed to get a piece of eternal satisfaction that everybody wanted... If the geographical pinball of a great acquisition wasn’t sweet enough, there are his tales of spending snow wintry nights in shacks out of necessity, going on a snow leopard hunt with the villagers, among the others.
The sights, smells and sounds that I lust for must be nothing but a nostalgic fact to my old folks, I am just trailing on their footsteps, clutching for a version of my own.
Cookie Monster: hey
May has been hard hit by my emotional state of crawling deeper into my shell. Inaction and inexpressiveness have been the defining labels. This blog has not seen much love.
"Books are immortal sons defying their sires" - Plato
Should introduce a 'friendship contract' to my close ones. There would be a clause demanding concern and the act of keeping in touch. This thought comes from lots of incidents of my old friends being unresponsive, and failing to keep a general tab on each others' lives. Each one to their own shell. Each one to reducing others' lives to a fascinating drama; and feeling bored when the fascination runs out.
It'd have been a charming morning had my friends not been lazy about going out cycling or for a walk.
It's odd when people find themselves not qualified for an opinion or a suggestion. Generally, they convince themselves of this disqualification on the basis that they themselves couldn't buy completely into the fact, or - worse - from their emperical study of their own nature of going against this thought when the situation demanded of it. And the more personal the opinion is, the more conflicted we feel sharing it.
Knowledge refresher
Coinciding with the 2009 women's day was my viewing of "Vivre sa vie" (1968) aka "My Life to Live", about the spiraling life of a girl Nana (Anna Karina). The movie ends with the realisaiton that it was never, indeed, her life to live.
It could be our story: about a painter obsessed with portraying his love.
I daydream very well. And lately, is been a reminder of how badly I need more of it.
So there are days when you have a fixed routine, 9 to 7 kinda work, a sad lunch, only chips and coffee through rest of the day, you know ... ending up with a general lowered expectations about your own self. 
I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And in this a question arose without an answer: who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I felt drawn into a void. I didn’t know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and the fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved. The next morning I woke up and everything was so peaceful. The peace was there because there was no self. Just a sense of presence or “beingness,” just observing and watching.
I have fondly fallen for a 2 month-old calf at the milkman's.
The world is a game. And this game is defined by game theory. See it as the iterated prisoner's dilemma...we have repated exchanges with other individuals, and each adopts their own strategy which is built from being rewarded/bruised several times in exchanges in earlier stages of our lives. Being 'mature' is what we call adopting a consistent strategy in such exchanges. However, considering the family as a single unit, being 'mature' is when you can exactly mimic the strategy of your elders.