Ya Bitch!

“I wish that life was like it is in the movies,
´cause the hero always gets his way,
No matter how hard it gets on that dark lonely road,
At the end he´s got a smile on his face...”

I can be pretty tactless...unreasonably candid, at times to the point of being rude. Yeah, I know it’s not a good thing. I’m old enough to “know” when to keep my mouth shut; but then I’m often tempted to do the exact opposite. More often than not, simply because it makes things easier. It makes the other person see things exactly the way you want him to; you don’t have to keep spinning a pack of lies; and it takes just a fraction of the effort it would’ve taken to put things otherwise.

I see it as normal to get annoyed & angry once in a while, to hate somebody for some time (I don’t hold grudges for life. I’m not a baby, or a dork!). I’m not a saint. I can’t lovingly embrace the entire human race & I have my own pet peeves. Unfortunately I, all too often, get caught in a position where I just can’t explain to the other person the “why” of my displeasure without coming across as a complete bitch. Over the years I’ve almost stopped caring about what people think. But then I am a social being and for all I say or all I do, I won’t pretend it doesn’t matter at all. At least it matters to the extent that people think I’m as evil as I actually am, and not any more so. Especially when I’m willing to accept and admit that I am evil.

And then I come across people who are unrealistically good. Their string of sacrifices and their heart-rending thoughtfulness betrays no limits; their frustratingly illogical ideas of right & wrong never cease to amaze; and somewhere it starts bordering on & eventually translating into pretence. Sometimes, it is downright pretence right from the start. For sake of political correctness (if there’s any left) I won’t go into the details of the pretence. But it is astounding to watch the perennial saint turn sinner; it is exasperating, if anything, to hear their irrational explanations for playing the perennial saint; and it is tragic when you don’t figure in the fan club. Needless to say their fan club spans 90% of the face of the earth. Thank you, remaining 10%!!

My harebrained idea of diplomacy is withholding information. Sadly that’s as far as I can go. And so, I’m often left wondering how sick people think I am :-? And I wonder why others can’t see through the absurdity of the entire situation... and finally I wonder, is it me or is it them...

The heat, the heat!

I say it’s easy to write bullshit. Needless to say, it’s absolutely unnecessary to prove it and hence I shall gladly go ahead and do so for next few lines :D

It touched 47 degrees today I heard. Yeah, it might be 47 degrees in other corners of the earth, but unfortunately for you I’m caught in one of ‘those’ corners.

For the past few hours, I’ve been subjecting my already erratic brain to stress it has not endured in quite some time. Now the heat and the unrelenting “stress” has set the molecules (or is it atoms :-? ) of my brain into a state I would like to refer to as plasma. I love saying my brain is melting, but today it has gone a step further and done me proud. In fact if you look closely you might observe a magnetic field developing around my head.
I wonder if Thing (“Thing” is an adorable li’l, violent, spastic robotic arm that keeps coming after me) needs the nuts & bolts to hold it together any longer. I think the joints might just fuse together if left in the sun; it must be the evil AC working against the joints!

Ahhhh, the AC...

After the sun roasts all human functions into a state of uncontrollable malfunction, the AC slowly entices the brain into a near-permanent (fairly recurrent) state of inactivity. The sudden (unbelievable) relief penetrates your skin, seeps through your bones and steadily makes it way towards the entity I mentioned is now in the plasma state. Time comes to a standstill, as does work (huh?!) Life goes on peacefully for the next few hours (hours did you say!) as I shrug off a few irksome attempts to disturb the tranquillity around me.

Then, a sudden tornado starts taking shape around me and before I know it, the calm’s replaced by a blast of heat and my brain cells, already deep in their slumber, start jerking spasmodically. It works like a nuclear reaction and soon all my brain cells start flying about... oh wait! I think I hear a thud... awww, another cell hit my skull walls... these cells I tell you... tsk tsk tsk...

And coming back to the point...

There was none to begin with! Hah, gotcha!


>> Those who think scientific terms & theories have been misused above can go take a hike... maybe in the afternoon sun tomorrow, that’ll teach you a lesson!!

And those of you thinking it wasn’t 47 degrees today... Why are you even reading my blog?!

Jeena ECE ka naam hai...

I have to say adversity really kicks up my creativity quite unlike anything else. Right when I should “not” be spending time pondering over my verses, not surprisingly, that is exactly what I end up doing.
And so, whenever my brain starts to melt and tries to wriggles its way out through the pores of my skull; or when my eyes feel like dried lemons, my inner creative voice carelessly takes me the precipice of sanity and then follows an SMS enthusiastically forwarded to ‘fellow tronixians’ (God bless free messaging!) and a few elite others.

I don’t recall all the messages I’ve come up with; but, as I end four excruciating years of writing exams for utterly, bitterly delightful subjects and lovable teachers (tormentors?), it only seems fitting that I put up the few that I remember.

V Semester: Before Control Systems, the 4th paper in a row after 3 miserable others...


Glug, glug...
.
.
.
Glug
.
.
Choke, sputter...



gulp, gulp, gulppp...


Drowning in the ocean of mind-numbing drudgery and brutal torture; poor, agonised soul bids farewell to this world. May her soul rest in peace. Amen.

VI Semester: Before a midterm

Clink!

Proposing a toast to all fellow ECEians who are embarking on an eventful journey spanning the 3 most uncertain days of their lives!

Hail Mogambo!!

VII Semester: The night before submitting a ludicrous Networking assignment with mindboggling pie-charts & diagrams that made my eyes feel like ‘dried lemons’ although I’d completed barely half of it...

Shaheed XYZ...

Networking ki assignment copy karte karte insaniyat ki sarhad par 21 october ko apne praan tyaag diye...

Jai ECE!

VIII Semester: Another midterm, that barely felt like one ;)

The woods are lovely, dark & deep,
And all I ever want to do is sleep,
Lord, no more grades do I want to reap,
Then why am I drowning in exams neck-deep?!

Needless to say, I rose from the ashes after every demise...
Yup, I’m a tough one, just like everyone else! :p

These last days...

Another leaf spirals to the ground; another ray fades into the sunset... Another drop into a pool of uncertainty and another war with obscurity begins as I count my last few steps towards it. Something hits me and gets lost in a blizzard of occasions and celebrations. I feel the voices turning into echoes and my life as it has been shrinking into a memory. I like the blizzard around me, it keeps me occupied. It’s the calm after the blizzard I don’t want to wake up in.

I walk towards the horizon; I stare at the setting sun. It hurts my eyes. I turn away my face and stop for a moment. And then I open my arms and start running towards the fading sun...
I want to see the sun rise again.

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do”

John Locke keeps saying that throughout L.O.S.T. And with such fire in his eyes, it’d give anybody the creeps. It made me think he was psychotic! I guess I’d forgotten what it is like...

I don’t need to be told what I ‘can’ do. I can do without the usual morale-boosting, adrenaline-pumping “you can do it” routine, doesn’t penetrate the surface much. But that’s what you get more often than not (and it’s a good thing! It means people care for you).
Try telling me what I can’t do... that I’m incompetent, I’m not good enough; it sets off a wild fire through my nerves. In that one moment I’m no different from John Locke. I might not make it, but I’ll die trying.

I don’t want to launch a feminist diatribe on how girls grow up discriminated against or how we lose our identities amidst all the morbid generalisations, but if there’s anything that keeps women going it must be the seething frenzy set ablaze with every ‘ladki hai...’ and the laughter that follows the bitter mockery.

I maintain that I’m not a feminist. I’m an individualist. And laugh as much as you want at that, but imagine for yourself what it must have taken for an individualist to change her stance from almost- anti-feminist individualism to dangerously-bordering-on-feminism individualism...

Lost & Found

There are a lot of things I’m fond of; many that I’m crazy about. But somewhere on my journey from childhood to being a twenty-something( :-!) these things that put idiotic grins on my face have faded out of memory, stumbling out of my happiness-basket one after the other.

I used to be crazy about reading books. I started reading in kindergarten. I remember I used to hold my library books like trophies (it was after all the first time in my life I got to choose anything). Later in school, I started gobbling books. I’d scout for fat books, so I could wander about in my parallel universe longer and I’d mourn after every single book got over.
And then I stopped reading books for the same reason I loved them so much. I’d drop everything and anything to get back to them.

I used to be crazy about computer/video games. Some of my happiest memories are those of me and my brother playing for hours together. The Prince of Persia gave way to Tetris, and then a bunch of others till it finally stopped at NFS. And then they evaporated out of my life. It’s been quite some time since I played any of those games. But I remember how the joystick would be my ticket out of the real world.

I still have that little diary of poems and snippets I spent years collecting. I’d actually thought I’d get my collection printed some day. I still read the diary. It still makes me smile. And I still wonder why I never continued. I can’t even remember when that journey hit a roadblock.

Of all the things that got washed away with time, I never imagined sports would be one of them. My idiotic grin grows in direct proportion to my proximity to the sports field. And when I’m on it, you’d probably think I’m on morphine. Incredibly, I gave up sports for some 2 years. And a part of me died without my realising it. Fortunately for me, it came back from the dead after 2 years and my frayed memories turned into a new Technicolor movie.

I’ve decided I’m going to find those missing pieces of me some day. Maybe they will show me the way back to my lost parallel universe – my childhood Utopia.

I’m working!

I wanted to call this “A 101 ways to pretend to be working”, but I realized (and quickly enough) how disproportionately ambitious the task was. It was like aiming to land on the moon after having invented the bicycle :D I know how silly it is to even have come up with the idea in the first place, but then I’ve already touched upon the astounding effects of boredom previously.

During my training, I found that when staring at a PC starts to lose its appeal (not that it had any), watching nameless people move back & forth suddenly becomes remarkably interesting. In fact, I watched these nameless-people-who-look-all-the-same-in-formals so much; I could identify them by their footsteps and even their hair. A bunch of people I’d take special interest in tracking were the people I was answerable to. They’d bring out the best of my ‘I’m-very-busy-doing-something’ acting abilities.

[Having said that, I solemnly hope there are no potential employers reading this. If they are – “Sir/Ma’am, I’m a very sincere, industrious individual, please do consult my superiors & associates in case of any reservations. And do not hassle yourself by reading any further 0:-) ”]

For example, jotting down or typing completely random stuff provided an excellent cover for my joblessness. I could glance at the screen from time to time (or all the time, if I was typing) and it looked like I was taking notes. I took to doodling and sketching absurd geometrical forms like I was a professional. It was akin to making an intense effort to sketch a beautiful woman and ending up with a stick figure instead. But in the unbelievably dreary environs of the place I could call an AC prison, anything & everything except work revealed entirely new, exciting dimensions.

I stared at the tube lights wondering if there was a glass cover beneath their holder and marvelled at how pretty they looked. If I wasn’t already finding the sight of the monitor revolting, simply staring at it blankly did the trick at times (that’s how most of the people looked when they were working). I scrolled up and down the PDFs, edited the Word documents, and dug up the entire hard disk in search of adventure.

I wouldn’t say that the exploration of the PC was entirely futile. I did discover an incredibly amateur game of Snooker, which would take a minimum of 15 seconds to start and shut down. Nevertheless, the programmer was considerate enough to have included this feature called “Boss” where the ESC key would minimise the game to a nameless tab in the event that your boss interrupted your game. Except that the game was to be played using the mouse.

I tortured the MS Office assistants to no end (Animate... Animate... Animate...), every single one of them, till I actually started feeling like a cold-blooded despot. It reminded me of “Naach, Basanti, Naach!” Except that these poor fellas didn’t have much of a choice and seemed quite willing to oblige. I must admit I really miss them on my Vista system; they were, after all, the only companions I had in the solitude of my deserted semi-cubicle.

Back!! ...without the Vengeance!!

No, I’m not jumping on to any bandwagon this time; I’m just stepping out of my slumber as usual... I started blogging couple of years back and while I ‘did’ continue to write all this while, I just did not put in the effort to post all the stuff online. And although I managed to “pour my heart” into a lot of pieces of paper, a lot of the pieces of my liquefied heart have been misplaced. I just have one piece remaining, the one about my training. So I’ll just start with that one and churn out more with time...
And yes, I am not promising any interesting reads here. It’s just convenient to announce the link so I don’t have to keep repeating it to people (now I wonder why I chose such an ornate name for my blog :-? ). Do drop in comments. That would be really nice. And if you don’t, maybe I’ll start badgering you and “that” may not be so nice :D