IDC++

Depressed. Mildly.

2010-05-05T22:32:00.000-07:00

Face it. There is nothing grand about it. No grand escapades, no great adventures, no grand encounters, not even great and grand tragedies. There are only two grand things in your life - overwhelming hypocrisy and your own repugnant mediocrity.

We have grand conversations, where poor excuses for an adventure are flimsily stitched together into a grand tale worth sharing. Worth sharing with a grand congregation of equally pathetic fools, grandly called a fuckin party, a misplaced hope that a ton of mediocrity at one place would somehow magically exceed its own limits and turn into something grand.

A hope that meaninglessly flailing arms and twitching legs to the nauseating beats of an idiot aiming to describe life, love and the entire universe in half a dozen words would add meaning to existence.

A hope that a drunken sermon, a pastiche of pop philosophy, cheap self help books and stylish movies, delivered by an all too obvious pseudo intellectual nescient idiot would suddenly show you something profound.

A hope that exchanged snippets of conversation about shared interests in deliberately chosen vague areas of art and sport would suddenly lead us out of this quagmire and show us the light. Exaggerated laughters, pointless screams, ad-campaign slogans - almost meant to shut out the din of a quaint voice deep within.

A fleeting moment of introspection, curiosity and the tiniest spark of intellectual activity doused out by an overwhelming desire to stop, show and tell. It is only strange how we all, with a heart rending straight face, admit how difficult the questions are and yet how easily we dispense with answers.

The Approval Junkie is well and alive.

Mother

2010-02-11T14:43:00.000-08:00

I love my mother. So does everyone, but I am in love with a certain kind of mother, now sadly a ~~dieing~~ dying breed. These are mothers from a time when India was still maintaining a surreptitious distance from an impending economic boom, much like a diwali enthused child would maintain from a firecracker she has just lit.

Back in the 80's, for the mums born in the extensive and extensively referred villages of India (which would be most of the mothers, as India back then, still quite comfortably lived in her villages) women empowerment was a parochial concept, and something that was earned gratefully and was not worth taking morchas out for. Modernity was still clad in the Sarees of Indira Gandhi and Sarojini Naidu, whose off colored Sarees they found rather distasteful anyway. Their achievements, while being whole heartedly commendable were still strictly inimitable, like the feats of a Jumbo circus ring master.

So as my mom, walked into the big blinding lights of the city plagued by incessant power cuts, she decided to stick with doing what she did best to cope with darkness like in the villages from whence she had come. Lighting candles.

She took gingerly to the modern gadgetry of the city kitchen, which in those days meant no more than a mixer grinder and a noisy Kelvinator and was only too happy to see the sliding door television box throw out government regulated images. Long before DD started churning out messages with young women stomping around vigorously in the name of girl child empowerment and equality, the desire to watch, weigh and imbibe these messages was replaced by a maternal concern.

Twenty years later, little has changed. This desire to feed and fend for her children is an instinct so strangely prolific, that in an instant you are at home when you visit your good friend's mother you have never seen before. It is an implicit code of honour, a unifying trait that perhaps most womens groups wishing for equality with men wish for. It is a profound statement for the discerning, which ,very wrongly, is seen as an acceptance of defeat by the fighting feminists.

Because, for my mom, it was never a fight and was merely an unintentionally profound statement to make - that without her, life would not be possible.

Thank you Amma.

Do not ring the bell

2009-09-02T22:23:00.000-07:00

"Hello there. Welcome to my world. No, don't be embarrassed. It is a little unkempt, mostly in disarray. Oh, careful with the door please - don't bang it shut. I always have trouble sleeping with those hinges swaying to a tune of their own.

Ah, yes. The east side windows are boarded up. Not a very neat piece of carpentry that. I just seem to hate the morning sun. It conspires thoughts of murderous pity in me. Burns through my skin, truth be told. My neighbours, they seem to enjoy it though. Immensely, collectively. Every morning they make elaborate preparations to avoid getting burnt. They have even written songs about the charade. Inane songs really, especially when I listen to it from that high chair next to the window. They amuse me - grinning wide, almost competing with each other, when the morning sun gathers them into a rag tag orchestra of sorts. Those boards, really - they are to avoid watching the spectacle.

The scarred and slit roof - that I inherited. Nothing I particularly admire about that either. The afternoon sun barges in like my aunts from Arog. Despicable place that. But my cat, Mellon, seems to like my aunts. And he is happiest playing with the shifting shadows of the coconut palm above the broken roof. It keeps him busy, all afternoon. He hurts himself, trying to catch the little yellow circles - much to the dismay of my dog. Collie, she is a little circumspect about my aunts. But only for a while. Soon, she would be busy wagging her tail, panting and enjoying Mellon's antics - and bring down my carefully arranged chaos.

The evenings are the only enjoyable part in here. I never removed the plastic coverings in which those east side boards came in, and the fading sunlight schemes up a brilliant display of gloomy afterglow within. But alas! I cannot open the door for my neighbours. The striking sharp wafts from without mercilessly kill the dancing queen within.

And it lasts for a very short while anyway. My generosity with the lights would always seem misplaced and pretentious to me. They fade away, too quickly, before you can sink in. Like that girl I once fell in love with. Contempt got familiar with us sooner than we could with each other. For the fading light, though, the parting is bittersweet. For, unlike the girl, my dancing lights will come again.

Oh no, it is not over yet. The real wonder of this world is the night. When Mellon, Collie are cuddled up with me, tired of their day long playing with my Arog aunts, and the sharp shadows of the lone candle fiercely battle the soft diffuse moonlight seeping through my broken roof, is when the Madman ventures out in the streets. I often suspect him of trying to break my front door down - but the pile of yellowing paper that keeps collecting itself behind my door, seems to hold the Madman back.

And you can wait and watch, with me and the sickly sweet sensation of terror biting your insides, wait and watch - who will win, the madman or the sandman.

Remember, what the doormouse said.

2009-06-13T05:48:00.000-07:00

Run, Rabbit Run,
Dig that hole, forget the Sun,
And when at last the work is done,
don't sit down, its time to dig an another one.

How profound. How prophetic. How poignant.

Mom. Dad. A red pill. A blue pill. A yellow pill. A white pill. All ates and ines. Psyches.I don't know the names. A stolen cigarette break. And one big anti-depressant called life. One fuckin big dose of it.

Plus.

One hour contemplating Tool. 'Fuck Smiley Glad-Hands with Hidden Agendas'. One hour spent in retrospect over that hour spent in contemplation. 9 hours spent watching absolutely stupid British romances. One hour simply dozing off with a smile on your face for all these hours that are available. For free.

And a wake up call called 'Time'. By the time you've gathered what has been strewn all around by the medication, by the time you realize what time it is - Roger utters the golden lines.

Run.
Rabbit.
Run.

Think about it.
Think really hard about it.

You don't have to.
You don't need to.
Fuck the run.
Fuck the race.
Its for the rats anyway.
Fuck that extra dime in your sagging pocket.
Fuck that wooden step on the fucked up ladder.

Stop. Breathe. Breathe in the air.
Look around. Think. Decide. For yourself.

Take a month off.

D'OH is not an accepted word in the OED. D'oh!

2008-04-21T12:16:00.000-07:00

There are tasks which expect a far greater impulsiveness to begin than they are worth in terms of either the physical work involved or the outcomes of doing them. Room cleaning, changing your bed sheets and regularly shaving are, for a true -girlless- bachelor, but a few of the examples. It is that what has given us generally introvert and reclusive nice guys the epithet of shaggy scags. A good test for the degree of this bachelorness is to see if you can spot the yellow flowers of the bright floral design through the sad brown hue tinting the sheets. Pushing the limits of endurance- you may call it euphemistically, but it is just a symbol of our proud lethargy.

Engineers create technology, they say. Well, mostly they just use them and complain about them with the added liberty of having the right to call everyone else a layman. But, the invention of the century, The Mobile Phone, is a notable exception. Now, that is not true of all who claim to have an engineering degree, but it is a good pointer. An engineer, albeit to a lesser extent than his non-technical college going cousin, is one who is constantly engaged in his mobile doing only the most mundane of all tasks that a modern mobile supports- messaging. Or, it could be one who constantly checks his pockets during a conversation ostensibly expecting an important call while actually concerned only if his extremely valuable gadget is right where he always keeps it.

Fortunately or otherwise, I belong to the same tribe. Both of them, I mean. In short, huge push needed to change the brown rag on my bed with my mind preoccupied with the obvious whereabouts of my cell phone. That one fine day, at 2 in the morning (or night), I gather all the impulse I need is enough for me to lapse into self congratulatory celebrations for a week. But, I decide to change the sheets. The old ones go into the bucket, the new ones are neatly folded up on the chair- time to get to work. Blistering Barnacles, this mind sailor has lost his beloved gadget. I remember taking it down to sangam, damning the clothes I am wearing for not having a single pocket and also evolution in general for not having humans evolve out of Kangaroos, coming back and discussing that beautiful story called "Double Dhamaka:The Matrix and Final Destination Combined" and thats when I lost them. The train of thought and the phone.

Part irate and part worried, I hastily decide to finish the bed thing and then go find my phone. Arms reach to the chair, eyes staring at the wall ahead- I pick up the sheets and CRACK!!. "D'oh!"

There it is! My dear little er, the relationship is a little complicated to put in words. I am overjoyed at finding the beauty, but she is in pieces. "The lunatic is on the grass" said Roger Waters too. Ah! the damn game of irony that fate plays.

The king, the imp and the end

2008-04-15T12:25:00.000-07:00

It is a glorious view from up here. I have always liked this place, a hundred feet up in the air, although I hate the fact that there are no elevators to get down. The quiet darkness was broken by something other than the twinkling city lights.

“Someone is coming”
“Hmm.. Yeah”

At that moment, I hoped for someone to have fallen off these treacherous stairs ten years before and hoped against hopes that it was just his ghost climbing up the stairs for his usual drift into thin air.

“Ah! I knew it! I knew it! I knew you guys would be here”

A friendly kick on my 6th rib from the top, some profanities uttered, my name called a few times and I drifted off again.

“Don’t lie! Look at him- he’s gone! Anything left? Where is it?”

One more ride of the magic dragon? I firmly chose not to, very firmly.

“Come on! Nothing is going to happen. Here”

Very firm was evidently not good enough. I decided to repent on my moral integrity some other time.

And then the night engulfed me. Words can’t describe what it is to sit so high, so high, deafening silence broken by the incessant chatter of the leaves in the breeze. To witness the bullet ridden midnight blue of the skies, the starry canopy showing shapes that weren’t there a moment before- convinced that god ever geometrizes- that is truly psychedelic. I looked at the road ahead and went off on another one of those tangents that lead nowhere.

“Have you heard of the story of the King and the Imp?”

“No”

“Do you want to?”

“Of course, tell me”

“Well, a long but not forgotten time ago in a place which was not much different from this humdrum lived a great king. He was not the greatest, but he was great in as much as his ruthlessness and the words of his sycophantic poets would permit him to be. He was firmly made to believe that he mattered, much more than the thousand people he ruled and more than all that did matter.”

“You mean 'Not a blade of grass moves without your diktat my Lord' mattered”

“Yes, precisely. I can't tell you how or why such priggishness was instilled within him, but I can tell you that the king knew what he will and will not tolerate, desperate to control all and everything.”

“So, on fine day the King, with a party of the elite guard, decides to go hunting to the edges of his kingdom where he spots on a hill the most beautiful of forests”

“What is that?” asked the king
“It is the forest of Isis, sire, that what resuscitates the barren lands of our realm every spring”

“No, sire” continued the minister, “ we should not enter the forest. It falls beyond your realm and it is said a wicked imp inhabits those lands”

“I conquer the realms I lay my eyes upon” said the king, and marched on, unperturbed.

And so, as would be expected, the king gets separated from his troop within the forest. After days of wandering, the now stricken king reaches a lake like he's never seen before and on a rock by the lake shore, he spots a cheery little boy with the eyes of an angel and the tail of the devil surrounded by a docile pack of dogs.

The king, his physical strength drained and irate at his own plight, walks up to the kid when he notices the dogs don't exactly welcome him.

Surprised at the nonchalance of the boy, the king stands back staring as the boy gets off his high rock and walks to the king. He promptly puts a dog collar with a huge stone around the king's neck and says- “ I expect to be bowed to”

The king, dragged down by the stone and furious at the treatment, yells “ Do you know who I am?” to which the boy replies, “Do you know where you are?”

For days, or perhaps months, the chained king endures what seem to be pointless travails across the most resplendent of lands. As they rest across a fountain of the bitterest water the king has ever tasted, the king resumes his daily rites of pleading- “Spare me”, says the king “and I shall see to it that the forest is never trespassed”

The boy scoops a handful of water from the fountain and pours it into the mouth of the king. The water is miraculously sweet and the with a touch the stone is now a glittering diamond of unsurpassed beauty.

“You are free to go” said the boy.

To cut an already long story short, the king having tasted the water from the fountain, returns to take the boy captive and atop a tower much like this one, the boy is tortured for days, stoned and dowsed with water for that elusive hope of extracting a miracle.

“My magic is in my solitude” grimaced the boy as the king stabbed him with his steely knife. “A worthy king you are,” he continued- “so fervent in your belief that your stupid idiosyncrasies need be tolerated and not scoffed upon. That you deserve to be noticed and cared for because you possess the most banal of all the virtues”

“Of the divinity held captive within you, you know naught, and when I am done with you, you shall know the difference there is, between you and me””

Thus saying I grabbed that obnoxious tormentor of mine and jumped, to be the very ghost I desired to come to my rescue.

2007-05-13T23:01:00.000-07:00

Back after a very long time indeed. Was just looking at my previous post! To be honest I had to refer the dictionary twice- for impeccant. Whatever that means!

OK, so, I've been getting zillions of requests from friends all over to write a testimonial for them and surprisingly all at the same time. So i decided to try my hand at testimonial writing. For one thing, it is harder than it looks, especially if you want what you write to mean something. I looked for a guide or a tutorial on testimonial writing . To my utter disbelief none were found! Not a single one. I mean, if there are tutorials which first insult you by calling you an absolute noob, then offer some unconvincing consolation and then shamelessly continue on with tutorials on topics like writing your very own bash script to show you the date, isn't it only logical that someone should have gone through the troubles of guiding us on how to write an impressive testimonial? Evidently not.

Like the bash scripting guide that I consulted ( which is seriously good, if you are interested, that is), this work of mine also I release under the creative commons kind of license- which means you can go around circulating this piece for free but just don't claim that you wrote it. So, now with the legal issues settled, lets get straight to the point.

A testimonial- says wiki- consists of a written or spoken statement, sometimes from a public figure, sometimes from a private citizen, extolling the virtue of some product. In our case, the private citizen (or public figure) is me and the product is you. You can blame capitalism for the blatant insensitiveness in likening people to products, but what the hell- the pope not very long ago wrote a testimonial for cocaine!

Why a testimonial? [Why all this- tell us how to write eh? Have you experienced the pain of having to read through open source documentation- this is just a teaser] Don't ask me 'why a testimonial?'. Technically, that question is out of the scope of this article. But non technically- if you can tell me why an account, I'll tell you why a testimonial. Testimonial, on social networking sites serves the same purpose as do neon lit billboards on busy city roads. Attract people (and flies), give them something to look at other than the uninteresting side (read 'about me'!) of either the guy or the car in front and also warn airplanes where not to land.

As in the case of billboards, what is to be remembered is that what is more important is the billboard and the lighting, not what is written there. In other words, the first rule of testimonial writing is to use language and/or words that are slightly out of reach of the average friend who visits. How do you find the reach of an average guy? Well, for all practical purposes, you- the writer- are the average friend. Which means use language and/or words that you can't completely comprehend, but seem to hint in a particular unanimously agreed upon direction.

About this direction vector- a few more pointers. After you have spent some time with anyone, you'll have a rough idea of what that guy/gal is or at least what he/she is not. With this as your basis, write multiple lines hinting at these points. Never hit upon particular point, be vague about generalizations. Get close to a generalization, say "X does dumb things sometimes" if you mean to say "X is a dumbf*ck". Get tantalizingly close; say "X does dumb things usually". The effect should be for all his/her other friends to agree- or at least show their consent- the language that I mentioned in the first point almost always takes care of this.

Keep the purpose in mind always. Remember whom you are writing the testimonial for. After an extensive survey of more than 3 testimonials, I find most people saying things like "I know him for…";" I remember the time when….”;"I was once…";"I am god..." and so on and so forth. It would be awkward to see ' Selvam Billboard Agency' hogging the limelight on a billboard, right?

Introduce self enhancing points with subtlety. Say things like "this bloke is.." to show them that you've watched a few Brit sitcoms and movies. Or say things like " a true champion like Schumacher.." to show your F1 knowledge. But remember to KISS. Never say things like "she rides like Lance Armstrong…" people might get confused with the other Armstrong {that moon guy} for all you know.

Throw in incidents. They enhance your credibility. Never elaborate on them though- extract a general theme from the incident and remember the point about generalizations. Never make self-effacing comments. If an incident involves that guy saving your life from a killer cockroach, let it go. It is not worth the insult- whoever that friend might be! If you are good at cracking bad jokes, be a good guy and don’t crack bad jokes. Talk about their love life, skim through the lost loves- love adds an emotional touch to the testimonial. Don't mention if you've slept with his/her love already. Don't even mention any future intentions to do so.

And finally, end it with a killer line. The kind to which a Yashraj films climax score can be played. Something like, "I've had many friends, but few....". You get the point I hope. If you have difficulty in ending the testimonial, try watching the end of a Yashraj film. Just the ending though- never ever watch the whole movie- even if you are writing for Yash Chopra himself. And to conclude, finish it in one sitting- however important that person. Testimonials simply don't happen in multiple attempts, it is just too hard to like a person for so long.

For a few quick pointers, see Axey's testimonial to me. He does the generalizations and the pointing well. You can also see Lugai's testi to Nimit.. He says bloke! Now you know he watches sitcoms too. For how not to write a testimonial, open a good looking girl's profile and search for those ubiquitous testimonials with the dots and hash design.

I think this should be a good starter for novices to write testimonials. For more help, don't ask me, just do some insane orkutting. If you want more help on how to write blogs like this one, read open source documentation. If you find it too boring, you are on the right track. So get busy now and start writing me testimonials.

PS: For those of you who are Open-Source Illiterates let me clarify. If you've ever done anything more than orkut, you-tube, music and movies on your computer, you'll know boring documentation is better than formatting the hard disk.

2006-08-28T19:49:00.000-07:00

We start off at the risk of being cliched, doubly so, one for the way we begin and the other for finding an excuse for the delay in the 'better late than never' adage. Let me begin before I equivocate, although ,ironically, that is about a fifth of what the thing this is all about. The whole point of the matter is testing a hypothesis of sorts, of what it takes to be ranked the number one by the numero uno search engine in the world.

Search engine optimisation is, strictly speaking, a condonation of the otherwise serious crime of Search engine bombing. To keep such "internet explorers" from running amok, there are the SEO contests organised by various agencies. And to safeguard the impeccant of the online community, an endangered species in itself, the contests involve, as bombs, phrases that no sane man in his right frame of mind would use.

IIT Madras, (NO, It is not a mental hospital), is a prestigious ( really prestigious) thousand acre plot of land where deer, monkeys and men co-exist along with endangered species like the black-buck (..|.. salman khan) and women. Of late the endangered species have got really 'n'dangered with a sharp fall of 1.6544% fall in population, while the undangered species is expected to see a sharp rise in population in the following years, by 27 % to be precise, thanks to the efforts of great men with a sharp sense of social responsibility.

Every year, this prestigious( really really prestigious) institute organises a technical extravaganza like no other, neither in this country or in the next. This event, rather modestly named shaastra , has millions of billions of trillions of events with enough prize money to put a certain william gates to shame.The events are spread over a wide array of topics ranging from the simple, like software design, to the extremely complex, like software design.

To the casual participant, the ones like the deers and the monkeys, who come for a stroll in the park once in a while without any purpose, there are the online events. One of them, the holy grail of all the wannabe spammers, ostensibly called the SEO, is what this whole article is all about. This year, after extensive searching in the leading dictionaries (one of those big books with a lot of words), the organisers have come up with a term like coecelanth shaastra equivocate durbatuluk zeppelin, which makes absolutely perfect non sense and also rhymes with shreeshanth yatra dislocate dumb bullock zeppelin. This is an attempt to save a casual browser of having to learn up so many new words, since they dont make much sense anyway (if they do make sense, you need help man, seriously).

My attempt, however, is to see if the world is interested in reading up and linking to absolute gibberish about things that hardly concern them. It wouldnt be surprising if people were indeed to enjoy such non-sensical blogging in an era where blogs are nothing more than ornate, poetic and pointless snippets from ones daily routine.