Chronicles of an Eclectic Life

Friday, October 07, 2011

Gorakhdham Express

Being slim(mer) - not as paunch-ridden as the average humanity - brings its own advantages to travel. Firstly, I can (figuratively) lounge on my modest berth, with all my paraphernalia in the vicinity - to stand a testimony to that is this present moment of me scribbling away on my upper berth in the train at 1240 AM under the dim glow of berth locator lamplight that peeks through the curtained wall (yes, some elite philosophy, this, to have curtains in all A/C coaches). Let me not get into my inability to catch sleep either coz of a creeping insomnia (as of late) or due to a light stomach.

Much of the past couple of hours of sleepless restlessness have gone into imagining shallow-DoF scenes of me doing random awesomeness, and of Grecian love tragedies.

Am involuntarily exercising my olfactory senses into identifying several puzzling and a few right unpleasant human smells in this A/C coach - unclean railway linen, stomachs stuffed with aloo-gobhi-bhindi-palak-roti about me, and my own need of a bath, round up the possible causes. Aurally, there's the occasional muffle of my own head scratching against the railways-provided towelette that makes something like a beatbox effect, ruffle of some surrounding passenger's sheets, a tinkle of bangles as some married woman twists in her un-husbanded sleep, whirring of overhead fan 2ft from my head, rattling of panes, hooks, and bottle holders. There's also the great metal fatigue of the rolling trains that we have adapted to relegating as background noise. Gorakhdham Express shivers through the night and often breaks to stop dead in its track to allow me this moment of cursive writing.

Now things smell of Hydrogen Sulphate. Nostrils hurt.

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Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Nonconformist head lead to insomnia

So much for an attempt to coerce myself into sleep; I'm still up at 0320. The conditions ideal to a proper sleep - darkness, A/C, a double layer of mattress, and a glass of milk a short while back - all failed, owing to the head that doesn't agree to send the body into a state of paralysis.
Says Mr. Lee: "Nonconformist head lead to insomnia very soon."
Hence here I am at my chair again, with a spinal column unhappy working extra hours, trying to hate this aspect of me, and also to scoop out all thoughts, process them into words for consumption in leisure time along with a cup of coffee.

Deep musings into the following events:
Kissed by a prostitute. Evading charging elephants. Held hostage by militants. Slapped by a prostitute. Making a movie. Mt. Everest. Bhutan.
Fucken neurons had to start right when I was at the crucial junction of sleep; return flight to reality. Will somebody please compensate for my missed hours of sleep?

From the deductive process of a nerd: Life is nothing but a robust API. Its all about having suitable Event handlers in place, preferably as compiled code rather than interpreted code.

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Look, some black squares!

This, yes, this, was how you'd have found me through half of my day. Doesn't look particularly appealing or productive, does it? The couple of guys besides me at the office would be thinking I'm having some denial phase, or performing some pre-Dussehra ritual to bring fortune and prosperity to my home. What I was upto, in fact, was a cyclic moment of nerdiness, that cycle having long come under arrest and taken to rust, and only now seeing some labored movement, owing to the demands of my employer and the resulting diversionary delving into AR (that black square thing being a marker that can make parallel universes sprout from your palm).
Slow creepy day, in retrospect, spent in a half-dazed resulting from yesterday's dash to Nzm to bid a second farewell to Shiv, and then return late in the night - a night that also involved the prostitute chronicles. Hard to hate humanity when the social circles involuntarily narrow down to a few beaten-down faces between the hours of employment that hold no common thread to debate upon, and are as adventure-less as our moms.

Another anthropological observation made today, that despite having an entire population of jerks, the men still find reasons to invalidate the opposite gender and find their arguments and expectations frustrating, particularly after experiencing the things that trend in a housewife's head. This would be due to a difference in perception of the necessary security devices. Indoor worlds, ideal worlds. If we take "society" or "culture" as an accumulation of security devices, this brings to a conclusion that the women in a household are truly the beholder of our culture - a culture of always-expanding hyperbole of security devices.

Day flows into the next, and I'm still awake. Somebody save my eyes and my head.
Wonder if she wakes me up this morn, as I've been hoping she would.

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Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Delhi prostitutes

UPDATE: Prostitute at my doorstep.

Funny condensation filaments - that seemingly jut out from the fields along the R. Yamuna to my left - make a convex shield-sorts above me. I occasionally gaze up to collect and make whatever i can of this fascinating sight that reminds of aerodynamic flow, and pedal along, and eat some more of the road. Surprises to the common man returning home tired, as a cyclist zips by, whistling to signal his approach.

Surprises to this cyclist, as his eyes steal a scene from the city's underbelly: a couple of prostitutes (ugly and man-like, as be the norm), sticking out from the dense grassy growth along the road, not far from Akshardham (to think that religion and sex don't mix, hah!), seemingly fixing their rates with a couple of freight-auto-wallahs, one of whom looks a boy of mere 12 (but at least somebody's compensating for me by starting out early; 'maintaining the balance', as we say).

Insert King Crimson's choral verse to "Ladies of the Road" here:

All of you know that the girls of the road
Are like apples we stole in our youth.
All of you know that the girls of the road
Been around but are versed in the truth

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Sunday, October 02, 2011

Rough cuts: Innovation and Education in India

Post-Brahma, India has had no creators. Only slaves. Production en-masse.
Watching The Social Network for the third time - second time in the same day - I couldn't help but wonder if innovation needs anthropological studies, to see how culture and the culture of innovation go hand-in-hand. D and I agreed to a common envy for Mark Zuckerburg, and also cursed our low-key college days at NIEC that now makes us feel kinda losers. But I bet that even the IIT-ans feel the same way. After all, India is a huge sweatshop: we dont invent, we replicate. (really cheap, too!) All the 'young talent' that graduates in this country, is a bunch of jerks. We don't have any Angel Investors here, because nobody wants to invest in a bunch of jerks.

Education-wise India is in a stalemate. Every education in India has a political context.
Take an example of PhDs: that the way PhDs are done is an insult to the academic process. Most people who enroll for a PhD do have their PhDs successfully finished, but it isn't because they end up learning on what they started their research on, but because they end up learning the exact science of 'successfully finishing a PhD in India'. Yes, 'Successfully finishing a PhD in India' needs inclusion as an official course in our Universities, since most will actually end up with that for majors, going through the same curriculum of:
- bending over to superiors,
- false co-authorship of papers,
- twisting outcomes,
- adjusting to external expectations,
- and basically just "doing as they're told".
We make friggin' Nobel Laureates of such people! Hah!

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Saturday, October 01, 2011

balcony sleep

So many of my posts lately been including some aspect of my sleep. Well, then, this one goes no different. Its weird that the most talk-worthy moments in my urban living are when I'm just a motionless bag, an example of mere respiratory processes, of hibernation, of out-of-consciousness existence. But sleep does become a quest, at times, like yesterday when I had to manage a midnight basecamp shift to my balcony, owing to a really long power outage that not only had me restless and fringe-perspiring in the bed, but got worse when even the inverter backup turned cold after some hours.

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Thursday, September 29, 2011

keep waking me up

Coerced my eager-to-be-out-and-about self back into sleep at the 0515 alarm. I was entangled in some dream again, but now this 'Venus in Furs' track has conditioned a sure-shot wake-up response in me, as I fumble about in a dazed state, often in a more-aware-than-expected fashion, since locating my cellphone is often difficult. Body clock is screwed - either my body feels humbled at any period of rest extending 4 hours, or has some 3AM circadian trigger which has me often find myself awake around this time. [leaving the environmental factors - mosquitoes that come uninvited, or an overzealous temperature setting on the Air Conditioner, or the neighbor's guitar&keyboard sessions - aside].
So in effect, I wake up to 4 alarms -

2 artificial ones at 0500, 0910;
2 inbuilt (body factory settings) around 0300, 1035.

Maybe my mind has become so scared of drifting away from the physical dimension that it routinely knocks to check if things are right.

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The best pet?

I have been stuck in a complex decision-making process. Which of the following would make for the ideal pet:

piglet
cats
lamb
monkey
kangaroo rat
arctic hare
turtle

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Short ride and back

Back from a short loop on the bicycle that made me shed exactly 2 sweat-drops worth of effort. Sad, I know, but I had to switch sides at the floral loop ahead of Sec 18 that goes over and merges back into the Greater Noida - Delhi road; the traffic congestion was too obvious to decide against. It usually isn't so, when I get my dose of adrenaline (spiked with minor amounts of dust, sand, and vehicular exhaust) with a long loop in the geometrical plane that also seems like a loop in the temporal plane - into the past, I meant. Well, obviously, we only have the capacity to think into the past, because we cannot think into the future, because the 'future' - even though it already exists by my theory - lies in an unprocessed, raw form, upon which the 'present' acts and processes into the 'past' so we could really get a grasp on the temporal dimension, only that its after it will have happened.

References to traverse back on the temporal plane, or 'Into the past', is a vague term now, anyways, a dimension that spans across 4 cities of varying geographical content, across 3 beverages of varying sugar content, across 5 kinds of alcohol of varying age and proof, across 3 kinds of chocolates of varying cocoa content, across several kinds of food, across 3 bicycles of varying built (ATB/Road/MTB), across 3 accidents of varying horridness, across some-dozen friends and acquaintances of varying 'je-ne-sais-quoi' factor, and across 4 institutes that constituted my engagement at all times. In the wisdom I sense upon myself right now, I say "Ameen" to this realisation - that the past is dense and scattered enough to not bait myself back into.

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Tuesday, September 27, 2011

bogus start

Nostrils imagine smells in the following order:
- Matar Chat, or shallow-fried boiled peas with Indian masala, topped with nothing but some lemon. Reminds of an evening at HazratGanj in lucknow.
- Light streaks of mint dancing about my nostrils, a strong ticklish aroma. Reminds of mint chocolates.
- Peanut butter. Obsession since forever.

Not good for an already-delayed beginning to the day. I'm not the one to blame - the one who jumped out on first strike of the morning alarm, from a dream about herding sheep and village girls through forested valleys, and punching people. I later slept in disappointment of C not responding to our plans for a run on the basic course.
Now I know why I've been intuitively feeling cheated at purchase of new shoes - they put in a right leg half a size more than the left one, its a ridiculous error, and I'm not even sure if the Nike folks are gonna appreciate my request now after coupla' weeks of use.
Been toying with the circuitboard here at work with plastic pens and spoons, owing to a faulty something that fudges up the power backup. My dimension of work has never been this expansive-yet-vague as in this present job.

Have been feeling hungry since morn, but not entertaining the hunger calls, since the day already feels so screwed.

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Monday, September 26, 2011

opinions and weekend

Settled on some opinions in life:

That my lolicon choice in anime is the silver-eyed, frazzled-sunset-brown-medium-length-haired, size-28-ish, 5-foot-6-ish, purple-silver-halter-top-wearing generic female stereotype.
That India is in a state of comic-book rot. Chacha Chaudhary, Nagraj, Super-Commando Dhruv... oh gimme a leash. Squirrel Girl - whose character came to life in the Marvel world with my onset of puberty in the real world - put it best in one of her panels (on whether she liked comic books): "I do. That was back when comic book worlds were places you wanted to escape to... not from."
Debating helps people solve their identity, as well as digestive problems. I hereby warn all my friends of having their blood on my hands, if they get honored with some lifetime achievement award for contributions to a mere theoretical framework.
I know you're being a dick, but why should I?

The weekend had me leaving my trail all over the city. I plug myself into several mutually-independent social circuits and make myself believe that I'm completing a social loop of sorts; imagine the current pulsating; am a capacitor when at my best, an infinite resistor when at my worst.

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Majorly ordinary

To be extraordinary one has to settle with the more ordinary matters first. One feature of the ordinary, however, is that it allows great freedom in how you do things or when you do them. Being ordinary, means being as insignificant as everything else, and you don’t have people holding a gun trigger against your head.
Insignificant things don’t get people holding a gun against your head, or having some avalanche in lurk, or necessitates crossing a river at its full run.

In other words,

whatever shit you
cook,
it won’t matter.

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Thursday, September 22, 2011

Girlfriend talk

Got into a conversation over girlfriends with the neighbor - yet again, to my dismay. He makes them look as essential a commodity, as my uncle does with the toaster, or parents do with an automobile, or friends do with security devices in life. I suspect he uses the concept of girlfriends as a conversation starter, like people wearing fancy watches, or those who gain fat on their bodies to fake higher caste.

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Sunday, September 18, 2011

Apple Girl postcard from Manali

Things that are meant to be shared, but are hard to keep part with. This photo, well is actually a postcard, was picked up at Manali. The intent to keep this one defeats the original purpose for it was made for - to be sent to friends afar. I think it comes under the same situation as a beautiful stamp, which people'd rather collect than use on a snail mail.
Say, if a chair comes under use as a table, would it still be called a chair?

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Friday, September 16, 2011

hold you close someday, i will,
to break your heart.
impossible is what we were meant to be;
impossibly close so we
could share a common breath,
and for you to kill me with your eyes
the slow onset of a mischievous smile;
then thin air you'd become
that i breathe in like a perfume,
again to let go.

you run away from me now

as my haemoglobin enriches everything but me,

a fountain of all that I ever was trying to be,

to get across to you.

but I lay dead as you run away

and, dead, I shall wait here for you forever.

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Wednesday, September 14, 2011

CSS me, my love

This is Über.
Download the link, extract the file anywhere on your hard disk. You'll understand the rest when you open the file in your browser:
http://saos.org/ycm.html.zip

Alternate titles for this post:
Get your girlfriend into CSS
The Standards-based way to love
I shall only love you if you love CSS3
Love knows no bounds. Only CSS.

Me and D were on a discussion about an emoticon related to extensible open xhtml outlines, when this struck me.
xoxo :D

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Let the Police help you with your bomb

Have a bomb? Want to kill people for a misinterpreted dogma? Can't find a crowd? Don't be discouraged - let the Police help you!

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Tuesday, September 13, 2011

not so hero types

The best compliment of the day came from my neighbor, a film school student who just moved in next door, as we were dangling from parallel bars in the park: "Main toh apni film mein aapko hero loonga". Of course he couldn't see the size of my inflated pride at that moment in the dark. I complimented him back with a "Main toh tumhein lene ki soch raha thaa" ;)
He was apparently fascinated by my (trifling) aspect of physical well-being, when he, himself having played cricket for MP state (that's a fuckin' big deal, btw), was bloating up from the side-effects of the urban lifestyle, and finding it difficult to maintain a prized girlfriend. We returned back home after a minor drama of him losing his cellphone in the grass somewhere.

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I literally, like, died there, dude

Adventurally-isolated Indians have a way of exaggerating anything that is remotely adventurous. They then deify it too. Then come the falsifications.

Thus a small trek in the Nainital forests becomes a "battle against survival", a trip to Kedarnath becomes "playing at God's footsteps", a trek to Vaishno Devi becomes "a miracle story", and a hired-taxi ride to Rohtang Pass wearing ridiculous astronaut suits becomes the last word in adventure for a huge chunk of populace - the only thing bigger than this is when you also hire those unimaginative wooden sledges at Rohtang Pass, pushed by skinny Nepalis, who take your picture then push you off the snowy/muddy slope at the guarantee of a harmless slow descent. That's one up on life!

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