The flying smart-aleck..

A long time ago, a friend asked on his blog : 

do i take a leap of faith, reach out and risk falling, failing?
or,
do i maintain the status quo, not do anything, and wait for the universe to do it’s thing?

why does it always have to be so bloody difficult to make a choice in such situations?

And I replied, in a slightly smart-alecky way.. :

the universe does not do anything if you sit on your bum. it might discern enough to assist you if you're helping yourself. and even then, the best you could count on is a tailwind in the direction of your leap of faith that might take you a precious few additional millimetres forward. your main propellant will still be the faith in your leap. the stronger you leap, the more wind there will be beneath your wings, keeping you afloat across the abyss. its basic aerodynamic theory, actually.



Today, I read it, and smiled. :)

The death of magic

It was a balmy afternoon in 1993. School had come to an abrupt end at around quarter to two, and everyone was herded into the assembly hall. This was highly unusual, but the break was a welcome one for the bored kids of all sizes occupying twelve classrooms. As they walked into the hall, they noticed with interest that the curtains had been put up. Normal business was conducted in the hall without curtains; they were brought out only on special occasions. They also noted with dismay that there were no carpets or chairs laid out, as is usual for special occasions, and this meant sitting on the uncomfortable and dusty concrete floor. Some of the elder ones had figured that whatever this was, it seemed short notice. They were soon seated, and after some squirming about, were all settled in. 


A little boy of about seven or eight was sitting with eyes fixed on the curtains, about two or three rows from the front. He had to take his eyes off the stage when classmates seated nearby interrupted with chatter, but soon all eyes were on stage since they had seen some interesting looking people enter stage from the corridor. The curtains went up, and joy of joys, it was a magic show. It was the first ever magic show the boy had ever seen, and since it magically killed the remaining three periods of class, it was even better. The magician was a portly man with a mustache that looked fake, and he was clothed in flowing robes and a cape. He took centrestage with ease, and soon the kids were all in rapt attention. At least the younger ones were. 


The boy looked on transfixed as the magician performed one trick after another. An assistant disappeared inside a box and reappeared, cards were picked out with unerring accuracy, and a dove was pulled out of a hat. The man was seemingly a god, there was nothing he couldnt do. The cheers grew louder with each successful trick, but the boy was unaware of the noise. This was the first time he had seen anything like it, and he was mesmerized. The magician lifted his wand and waved at the audience indicating that he required silence. The noise fell and the kids paid attention. He required a couple of volunteers, and he asked the audience who among them would help him out. The boy enthusiastically lifted his hand, but a look around told him that pretty much every hand in the auditorium had gone up. 


Just as enthusiasm was turning into mild dismay, the magician pointed to the boy and said "you, young man. why dont you come up here and give me a hand?" Elated, the boy got up and made for the stage. They were seated in the hall according to height with the shortest up front, and if there was another perk to being short, he couldn't quite think of it at that moment. As he climbed the four or five steps up to the stage, he wondered where he would be if the magician were to make him disappear. Would he float through space? Would he become invisible? He saw the second volunteer, a boy younger than him but equally wide eyed, making his way up the stairs on the side of the stage. If they both disappeared, would they meet somewhere in the middle? What if he can't bring them back? What will they tell their moms? 


Trembling with nervousness, the two boys made it to the stage. The magician looked at them and declared to the audience that they were unfit to be his assistants. As elation and nervousness threatened to turn into dismay once more, the portly man produced two capes, and all was well again. The boys were fitted out with capes, the elder one in a fiery orange-red cape and the younger one got a leopard print cape, and the magician turned to the audience and declared them fit to be his assistants. Our boy returned to nervousness and awe. Magic was happening around him, and he was part of it. Better than a ringside seat, he was in the ring. He held out tubes for the audience to verify that they were empty, and watched stunned as the magician produced flower after flower from it. He handed him a white handkerchief and the magician folded it and then unfolded it and turned it red. Finally, after a multitude of tricks, the boy was asked to stand in the centre of the stage. 


Shy and nervous, he took the three steps necessary to propel him to the required location and stood facing the audience. There was a bit of pride in being the assistant, and he wasn't doing too good a job of hiding it as he looked at envious friends in the rows beneath. From the magicians voice over the loudspeakers, he figured that a glass of milk was being placed on his head. He felt the bottom of the glass on his hair as the magician held it above him without placing it on him. He wondered if the glass would in fact be placed on him, since he wasn't too sure he would do a good job of balancing it. He didn't want to mess up the trick and embarrass the great man. The other boy brought a straw that went into his mouth, with the other end sticking out in the air in front of him. The magician announced that the assistant was going to drink milk in this fashion. He was asked to suck in with the straw, and he did for all he was worth. 


The audience cheered in front of him, but something was amiss. There was no milk coming in through the straw, and he had been worried he messed up somewhere. Yet the audience was cheering, and when the magician stepped in front of him to show the crowd the empty glass was when he realized the milk had indeed disappeared. A strange disappointment grew within him. He wasn't as enthused as before when the magician put the glass under his armpit, covered it with the cape, and returned it full with milk again. He was asked to drink again, three or four times, with the same result. He began to suspect this was all some sort of trickery. Why was there no milk in the straw? As he stepped down the stage at the end of the show, classmates gathered around and patted him on the back and asked a hundred questions. He gave a blank smile. He saw the other boy telling stories to his classmates who had gathered around. All he could think of was to go to the playground. 


The announcement came that even though there was forty minutes left till the end of school, there would be no more class and they could all play outside until the school vans came at three thirty. He made his way to the playground and sat on one of the swings, staring blankly ahead as he filtered out the noisy kids on the merry-go-round and the slide. If it wasn't really magic, what was it? He was certainly tricking us, and there certainly had to be a how and a why. How? was there a secret pipe in his sleeve? Why? perhaps he didn't have real magical powers? Over the course of that afternoon, he had lost blind belief and was questioning everything. Three kids a coupla classes elder to him made their way to his swing. They had questions. "Tell me something," the girl who seemed to be their leader said, "did you really get milk in the straw when you sucked in?" 


"Yes", he said, looking at their slightly disbelieving faces, momentarily setting aside his struggle with magic and logic. "It was real magic." 














PS - this blog has been ignored for too long, and I intend to rectify that soon, (hopefully). the flying course is over, but unfinished posts remain to be published. I hope to do that over the course of this year believing late is better than never. This was a story written a while back, one I'm not entirely happy with, but I have nothing else to post for now. 

Merry Sacrilegious Xmas..

This is the Christmas email I sent out to friends, thought I might as well post it here in its entirety, so that I can make 2010 my bloggingest year yet :)

tl;dr just a long winded way of wishing you a merry xmas.

So I was wondering, what if Jesus were born in India? What would we get if we replaced Bethlehem with the idiosyncrasies of modern day India? Well, legend goes that Joseph and Mary had to travel to Bethlehem to pay a special tax. We're right on target then! I admit my version of the nativity story is bits and pieces I remember from school, polished off with a six-year-old friendly version that I read on the interwebs after the idea for this post struck me, but bear with me here. So, Joseph and Mary travel to India where Mary is to deliver the Son of God. Of course, health insurance was a problem, and India being the prime destination for cheap but world class healthcare, they decided to take the medical tourism route. Thanks to an unfortunate booking on Air-India, their travel dates were anyone's guess. A little known story goes that the angel who came to Mary to tell her she would bear the Son of God had to make a coupla trips back to confirm their booking with the local Air India offices. As a result, Joseph and Mary arrived in India the night before her due date. The journey left Mary wishing for a trip on donkeyback, like in the good old days, since the aircraft was even less comfortable than that.

Upon arrival, they were greeted with burning tyres and buses. I guess it was apt that the day before the Lord's birth was a bandh in India. This was of course, strategically timed by the political parties who called for the bandh, so that two productive days would be lost. The birth of the Lord would be a holiday in any case. As a result of the bandh, they were left stranded. Most of the hotels weren't open, and Apollo Hospital was kinda far from the airport. Determined that the Son of God would not arrive into this world at the airports rather apt but unclean arrival terminal, they ventured out. The few open hotels immediately jacked up their rates tenfold seeing that Joseph and Mary were a) foreigners, b) desperate for a room. In the end they bribed the custodian of a Yatri Nivas run by the state tourism corporation and he gave them a semi-passable room for the night. Needless to say, there were bedbugs and mice galore. At this point, Mary is rather ironically telling Joseph that she has seen stables cleaner than this back in Bethlehem. A while later, the Lord is born, and Joseph, having had an overdose of the recently concluded FIFA world cup, names Him Jesus, ostensibly in tribute to Jesus Navas, the Spanish winger.

Now, some wise men arrived by the red-eye flight from the Promised Land. Being wise men, they knew fully well not to carry expensive gifts since they would have to bribe the customs officials to get them into the country, and it wasn't quite worth it. Instead, in their wisdom, they shopped duty-free. I'm not sure of the exact nature of the gifts they bought, considering duty-free didn't stock gold, frankincense or myrrh. The guy at the check-out counter didn't even know what the last two were. I'm guessing they bought at least one bag of Herschey's Kisses chocolate, judging by the purchases of all foreign-returns in my office. They were to follow a star that they knew would rise, but being wise men, they had factored the smog in our cities into their plans, and had brought along a GPS. They ran out of wisdom soon, though, when they discovered that their expensive Tom-Tom unit didn't have much coverage in India. They had more pressing worries though, they had to register themselves at the police commissioners office as foreigners before they could proceed to see Jesus.

In the end they did get there, only to figure out that they were a bit too late. Senior officials in the immigration department had already leaked to the media information regarding the presence and whereabouts of Joseph and Mary in India, and the wise men were beaten to the post by Barkha Dutt who was shouting at the Child, trying to get the first ever interview with the Son of God. Vijay Mallya was there too, since he was tipped off about the water-to-wine capabilities of the Kid, and the folks from Dr Batra's Homeopathics were there since they needed His miracle cures since Homeopathy was shite anyway. Lalit Modi was offering him an IPL team, and the producers of Big Boss wanted to do an Ed TV style reality series on his life that somehow also involved walking on water while carrying Rakhi Sawant. The Kid could do it without a CG budget.

yeah i think i should probably stop.

PS2, if i weren't agnostic, i would say that this has probably assured me of my ticket to hell.

PS3, Merry Xmas y'all. :)

PS4, yeah i know, i missed out on lotsa details, couldn't be bothered, etc.

love, take care, etc.

Clean bike, wide grin..

She sits in the workshop in all her glory. Having been a bit of a hangar queen lately, she seems intent on testing my patience. I think she has a smirk on her face. I remind myself to be a bit less silly, this was a bike after all. Whatever was causing her to throw her little hissy fits, we had to get to the bottom of it and fix it, lest she throws a tantrum en route to Goa. A night ride is on the cards, and a possibility of the bike throwing tantrums on NH4 might not sit well with my mental well being on the ride. I think back and remember that she's not really let me down on a long ride as yet, but as she (and I) are getting long in the tooth, I tend to anticipate issues more often these days. Thus, we're back at the workshop, where she takes centre-stage.

Syed the Reliable, coaxes and cajoles her into revealing what the vexing issue was. She's not easy on us, we have to check and eliminate electrical and fuel line issues before she finally reveals what was wrong. A tiny unreachable sleeve connecting carburettor to engine has given up the ghost. For all of 150 rupees, Syed the Reliable will have to dispatch a minion halfway across town to get a spare. The broken sleeve meant she was taking in an impure fuel-air mixture, which caused power and mileage to drop, temperatures (both hers and mine) to increase, and more importantly, stoppages. I would be doing 100+ on the ring road and for no reason, she would go on strike. And then when I'm on the verge of giving up and calling Syed for help, she would start up again, as if nothing was ever wrong. Sounds a bit like a marriage, I suppose. I wouldn't know. I leave her in the care of Syed and his minions, and walk the short remaining distance to work.

At five fifteen in the evening, I walk back in and see she's getting a wash. Syed has been uncharacteristically tardy, but that's okay, I have all the time in the world. They roll her out of the washing bay, oil up the chain, put on new handlebar grips to replace the old ones I'd lost in the last accident, and she's good to go. She's set me back two hundred and eighty eight rupees, but that's nothing compared to the relief of finally having fixed everything. A thousand couldn't fix her the last time I was here. I thank Syed and Co. one last time, and walk out of the shop, where they have her ready and purring, dripping wet from the wash. From the sound of the engine I figure everything's okay, it's an oddly reassuring sound. I get on, check everything, switch the purr to a muffled roar, and we're off. I watch the water droplets slide and fly off her sides as we pick up speed. I made it a point to ask them not to dry her after the wash. There is only one proper way to dry a freshly washed bike. And that is to RIDE it.

:)

On Beethoven and an Airplane..

This is probably a gratuitous post, so bear with me.





The first of the two is 'An Ode to Joy', by Beethoven. Like Fur Elise, this song also sounds immediately familiar even if you've never heard or paid attention to it before. The first time I really paid attention to it was at Aero India 2007. I'm sure you're not really surprised that there is an aviation connection here as well. I was at Yelahanka Air Force Station watching the afternoon round of flying displays. To be frank, i wasn't paying all that much attention to it since i'd already seen most of the flying routines in the morning, as well as on the day before. The American contingent was flying their F-16s and F-18s, which were doing pretty much routine stuff over airfield, and the commentary over the public address system was droning on with nonsense along the likes of "These airplanes have been the defenders of freedom since 1970s", etc. There was one plane i had missed, the Russian MiG-29 OVT, a thrust vectored version of the standard MiG-29, and i was really looking forward to what it had got to show.

The MiG doing its thing.. :)

The MiG's turn came, and the public address system sputtered back into life again, and started playing this tune. This amazing, vaguely familiar classical tune, timed to the aircraft's flying display. That display, to date, was one of the most beautiful things i'd ever seen, thanks in no small part to the music. The song was improbably slow for an airshow, but it was in fact a brilliant choice for a plane that had amazing slow-speed maneuvers to show off, including at one point stopping in mid-air at the start of a tail-slide. The crowd roared in applause for the lone Russian pilot who flew away from there as the star of the day, and the whole episode left the song in my mind. Yet i had no clue what the song was, for the next three and a half years.

I hunted for it high and low, and while people seemed to have heard the tune, no one could tell me its name. I even tried a website where you could hum and based on the tune the search engine would try and find your song. to no avail, though. until about a few months back, i was at a small party with my friends, and was humming this tune to myself when my erstwhile housemate nikhil, again, recognized the tune but couldnt remember its name. But his curiosity got piqued, and eventually he managed to track the song down for me a coupla days after that. I have posted above the version that is used as the national anthem of the European Union. The original i heard had no lyrics. The day after i finally found the song, i was telling my colleague benjamin the story of how long it took me to find it. Turns out i should've told him a long long time ago, since he blurted out the name the moment i hummed the tune. that song was right under my nose, in the next cubicle to mine to be precise, and i spent ages looking everywhere else.

I love the song, and i like the story, so i thought i'd share.

A borderline atheist's conundrum..

based on true incidents. written about a year or so back for a short story competition.

in two days, i was to leave for America. it is the dream of a good number of people i know, and i was poised to achieve it. i just didn't have the clothes for the mission. a couple of friends came down and decided to help rectify that, and they were more than welcome since i was rubbish at shopping. i roamed the streets of the city's shopping district, full of apprehension. not just about what clothes to buy, but more about what awaited me in three days time. i considered myself quite the traveller and wanderer, but this was far beyond what i'd traversed so far. our efforts stretched from afternoon to evening, and we were now at that twilight phase where the sky seemed undecided about where to go, stay with the day or give in to the night. my thoughts were on similar grounds, since i was headed someplace i was not too keen on, yet was thrilled for the experience of travelling into the unknown. i was confused.

we had come to a popular bookstore, near which there exists a clothes shop specializing in export rejects. by this point i had pretty much all i needed, and my friends were tired of picking stuff out for me so they headed into the bookstore to do some browsing and shopping of their own and left me alone to fend with the choices of t-shirts before me. t-shirts were all i had left to buy. in keeping with my 'hate-shopping' policy, i was done in five minutes, and all my t-shirt needs were addressed. unfortunately, it wasn't the same for my friends who decided to take their own sweet time browsing through books they were unlikely to read anytime soon. i wasn't left with much option but to sit outside on the stairs leading to the street from the building that contained both these shops.

as i sat there pondering over things i should probably not have been pondering about, a girl appeared. she was the sort of girl you couldn't help but notice in an instant. pretty in every sense of the word, commanding the attention of everyone who passed around her on the sidewalk yet seemingly unaware of it. yet she seemed unsure of what she was doing there, and merely stood in the middle of the sidewalk while people milled around her. i kept stealing glances at her while i waited for my friends, and she was facing away from me. i wondered what she was doing here, in the middle of this crowd. perhaps she was waiting for someone? for lack of better things to do, i kept looking and wondering. until she turned around. at which point, the decent thing to do was to look away and pretend i wasn't looking in the first place. which is what i did.

but then i was put into an unfamiliar situation. the girl looked straight at me, into my eyes. i tried looking away, but i was transfixed, to put it mildly. she started walking over towards where i was sitting, and i automatically started going through the usual checklists. i looked around to see if there was anyone behind me, and there wasnt. i looked back to see if she was still looking at me, and i was pretty sure that she was. maybe she suddenly decided to buy a book, or perhaps cheap export rejected designer clothing.. yeah, that had to be it. all these evaporated the moment she stood right in front of me, and said 'hi'. a simple, sweet 'hi'. were i my usual self, i would probably have said 'bond. james bond'. but what came out was a 'bwuuhh?' from my mouth.

she extended her hand, and i timidly shook it. soft hands, yet a firm handshake. it almost seemed like i met her at work and was concluding a business deal. i looked up at her face, and she was smiling. i continued with the checklist. do i know her? have we met at some party where i got drunk and did something so stupid that she remembers me? the latter seemed plausible, but somehow i was inclined to rule it out. i had the good sense to let go of her hand when the handshake concluded, but my senses were thrown off gear again when she said 'd'you mind if i sit down here?' another 'bwuuhh..' gave her the go ahead and she sat next to me. a few moments passed in silence, while i figured out what to say. predictably, i couldnt form a single sentence. anything i attempted to say would surely come out as the now familiar 'bwuuhh.. '.

she put me out of my misery by saying 'how are you'. which still had me wondering whether i have met her before. i wracked my brain in a vain attempt to remember, and despite priding myself on my memory, i couldnt imagine where i possibly could've met her. but on the positive side, i seemed to be regaining my ability to speak, and said 'fine. how have you been?'. this, in the remote possibility that we do know each other. she made small talk with me initially, while the processing abilities of my brain were almost equally divided between responding to her conversation and figuring out plausible reasons for how a girl at least three leagues above me was talking to me out of the blue.

small talk soon developed into a full-blown conversation, which may have lasted all of five minutes maybe, but applying relativity, it seemed like an eternity in my head. i was just as confused as i was at the start regarding why this was happening at all, but was more than happy to just play along. it was a random, free flowing conversation, neither of us knowing the other presumably, until the moment she said 'you looked worried earlier. what's the matter?' since i had been thinking of my upcoming journey until i saw her, i told her i'd been thinking about it and was apprehensive about heading there alone. she asked me if i had any friends here, and i said i had quite a few, mentioning that i was waiting for a couple of them with dubious reliability while shopping for things i needed on the trip. she asked me what i'd bought, and i showed her the shirts, sweater and t-shirts i had accumulated as part of the afternoon expedition. she said she was new in the city and had no friends.

i was disinclined to believe that somehow, perhaps it was her demeanour, but she insisted that was the case. at this point, any red blooded guy would offer to be her friend, but i was more inclined towards saying 'bwuuhh..' again so i kept shut. i wanted to tell her i could be her friend, and show her around town, but i was battling the now all-pervasive bwuuhh. which is when she said, 'would you like to pray with me?' i mustve made an expression of incredulity, because she immediately launched into an explanation. 'well you are worried about your trip, and i am part of the church of so and so (i forget the name).. so i thought prayer would help you'. she took my hand in hers and asked me to close my eyes before i could form a coherent response. once she held my hand, a coherent response was pretty unlikely, in any case.

so we sat there, on the stairs leading to the bookstore and the shop with cheap export rejected designer clothing, while the rest of the shopping public moved along on the sidewalk in front of us, while my friends looked at books they were gonna buy but weren't going to read, holding our hands, closing our eyes, one of us reciting a prayer while the other pretended to pray while wondering how a borderline atheist like him got into a situation like this in the first place. after another eternity, the prayer was over, we opened our eyes and she smiled at me. i smiled back, she let go of my hand, and,still looking at me, pulled out a brochure from her backpack. a fucking brochure, for her church. which was followed by a notebook where she wanted me to write how i found the prayer experience with her, and sign my name. i was too stunned for an indignant expression. i could shoot down pyramid marketing guys before they even took off, yet i'd been had this time. i accepted defeat and signed the notebook, and walked home with one less reason to believe in god.

Whats even worse? Shopping for Times of India..

Two rants.

Shopping. I do not subscribe to the line "lets go shopping". Do not. I can think of a million other things to do in that time, i might not do any of those things and probably will goof off on the couch at home, but i will not go. When i have to buy stuff, I know exactly what i want, and pretty much where i can find it. Within five minutes of entering a mall, i know where the t-shirts are, and in another two minutes i figure out the dark coloured ones, and one more minute to choose an appropriate number i require, and then its checkout. I do not like walking up and down wasting time looking at stuff i probably have no intention of buying. And my logic is this, that its bad enough giving my money to some two-bit corporation (not a hippie, not against corporations per se, just that its my money im parting with), but i dont have to give them my time. my time is mine (except when i charge $22 an hour at work). In fact, if i have gone on a shopping trip at any point, it was probably with people i value in my life. rant one over.

Times of India. What the fuck is the point of that paper? I know entertainment and titillation sells, i know they cover their pages with semi naked chicks and shiny advertisements even i like to look at occasionally, but i cannot stomach the absolute cynicism that drives a newspaper, thats right a NEWSpaper, to come out with a special obscenely overpriced edition on saturday that contains NEWS in it. what the fuck? a newspaper selling a special news edition on saturday? isnt that what they're supposed to sell EVERY day? and a word to the page 3 eco nuts who read said paper, i guess the irony is lost on all of you. cancelling your subscription to this joke of a paper that does nothing to enrich your life would probably save more trees than all your eco whining on said paper ever will. rant two over, over and out.

an old futile attempt..

A story I'd written for an ultra short story competition back in 2006. I think it had to contain the word message or manoeuvre or something, dont remember now. Found this, and a lot of other writing by chance yesterday. Thought i'd post, considering it's utter crap anyway.. :P

No, i didn't win any sort of prize.

Ever the practical guy, I had a plan. I looked at it again and again and again; it was foolproof. All the elaborate manoeuvres I had devised to pass her the message seemed to work like swiss clockwork in my mind. I could do no wrong. But you see the trouble was, I was convinced of my own genius. I failed to see that the genius itself was the flaw of my plan. And I failed to see the chasm between genius and reality. So, I fucked up.

As usual, detractors might add.

All my elaborate courtship manoeuvres were wasted, falling pitifully short of conveying what was in my heart. Now she thinks I've lost my marbles. Oh well, can't be helped.

I guess its much cooler to be a flawed genius anyway.

where is the ♥ ?

so here i am again, at 2 30 in the night, with loads of free time, and not enough sleep. those of you who may have been reading the stuff over here for a long time might be dreading another post along the lines of the great circle mapper post, and yep you're right.

this time i was playing around with alt codes, and you will be surprised to find what boredom sometimes drives people into. i started googling the alt-codes, one by one. and i only had to reach as far as alt+3, before i was kicked. please to be sharing the kick.

where is the ♥ ?

well to be honest pretty much every symbol in the alt codes list throws up similar results, and iv tested them under different conditions (blame it on continued boredom), but in case anyone finds different, gimme a shout.

the ♥ is here, btw..

the end minus five minutes..

In almost all the movies i've watched, there comes a point just before the end where i think, it would be so much more beautiful if the movie ended right here. this is usually because i either already know how its gonna end, or wish it would end a certain way, and i'd rather imagine it than have them show me how it's actually going to end. its different with books, though. i might have figured the ending of a book long before i even picked it up but would still read on, devouring every word, including an afterword if there's one. but in movies, i cant help but think that it would be so much better if they left the ending to you and me, and our imaginations.

but then, again, i'm well aware of the possibility of a mind blowing twist or change lurking at the very end so i keep watching anyway, reservations notwithstanding. and that's how i discovered the absolute nuggets of joy hidden at the end of pretty much every mr. bean movie, long after the credits are done rolling :)


this post was triggered by watching the movie, 'the red baron', btw..

Travel notes, mostly useless

shouldve typed this up long ago, but now that the papers i wrote it on are getting worn out from lying around in the depths of my bag, i think its finally due

McLeod Ganj - i swear to god we were received at the bus stand by lionel messi. well, the resemblance was uncanny to say the least. though it must be said that it took me at least five minutes to link the guide's face to lionel messi, and as a hardcore messi fan, i'll never be forgiven for that. Reluctantly, we didnt take Messi's hotel. It was dank and pylee swore there were suspicious stains on the sheets. So we went to the Tibetan Ashoka Guest House instead. For fifty bucks a head, i can tell you honestly that you will not find cosier accommodation elsewhere in the country, probably the planet. I'm usually averse to tourist guide books, but I have to grudgingly thank Lonely Planet for this find, and Amrita for lending it to us.

Monks - the most chilled out people on earth. Maybe these are the superficial observations of a casual visitor, but i think i can see why people from all over the world are attracted to their culture. They seem to have this ability to take everything in their stride. I couldnt sense, for instance, the ego and stubbornness i had seen in sadhus from my brief experience with members of that breed. the monks here seemed happy, had a polite smile for you anytime, and had embraced things that life threw at them. email, bikes, sneakers and crocs to name a few.

Thukpa - I've always had the opinion that this is the king of all tibetan food, filling in every sense of the word. rarely have i gone to a tibetan food joint without tryin the thukpa there. the ability to show off my mad chop-stick skills is an added attraction, of course. But i think, no im pretty sure, that i have had the best thukpa i'v ever had (or ever will) in my life so far at the Aroma beer bar in Mcleod. If i go ahead and try to describe it, there's a good chance i'll fail miserably, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

HRTC Bus Ride - According my esteemed co-traveller manu a.k.a. Mathew a.k.a. SI Mathappan, all buses on earth are crewed by two people : conductor Rajappan (pronounced rayappan in true blue mallu style) and driver Dasappan. (extra driver would be affectionately called spare Dasappan). we were taken from Dharamsala to Manali by none other than Lewis Dasappan, who was HRTCs driver in F1 before they left the sport to focus on public transport in himachal. But Lewis seemed stuck in F1 mode, since he seemed to find no difference between his bus and a McLaren F1 car, especially on the winding hill roads. The sound of bus tyres squealing is something i had never expected to hear except on BBC's Top Gear maybe, and I am deeply indebted to him for this new auditory experience. Few drivers scare me, and he was one of them. Coming from me, that's saying a lot.

"We should've fuckin' gone to a beach" - ever seen the movie snatch? remember the repeated refrain of "i fuckin hate pikeys"? the aforementioned line was my refrain for this trip. each time we ran into any sort of adversity, this was said. It must've been an overdose of goa trips, cos each time we were too cold, or too tired, or too broke, this phrase was uttered, accompanied by visions in my head of little cocktail glasses with plastic umbrellas in them. And i fuckin hate cocktails.

Film Photography - I have a film SLR. when i needed a camera, digital SLRs were useless and ridiculously expensive. so I went for a then state-of-the-art Nikon F-80. When every tom dick and harry around me had a digi SLR a coupla years down the line, I half heartedly extolled the virtues of old fashioned film photography. But now, Im sorta full hearted. I like the uncertainty of it. I'll never know how the shot turned out until I go to a GK Vale in bangalore. Maybe iv loaded the film wrong and the entire damn reel might be blank. But then again, good things happen to those who wait, so maybe the reel will be brilliant. My fingers will be crossed till i pay Mr Vale for his services and pick up the envelope from his shop. Its also an uphill battle for film photography. Even in touristy locations like Manali, film is hard to come by. To compound things, i decided at nine in the night that i have to have to have to photograph the hills silhouetted by the lightning, so i went out for film. And i had to search eleven shops (and a cyber cafe as a last ditch effort) spread over two kilometres before i found two overpriced rolls of ISO 400 film. I climbed back up the hill to our guest house vowing that I'll hold out even when shooting on film becomes much more of a hassle than it already is.

Signage and Hoardings - Sometimes when i see badly photoshopped shop and advertisement hoardings, as well as signage boards with poor english, i get this quixotic urge to arm myself with a laptop and vinyl printer and three horseloads of vinyl sheets and go about correcting those. Then i realize we would lose the charm of these places and would all turn into some boring place like germany. So, Child Bear it shall remain.

Plastic -At all the places i travelled to, i couldnt help but notice that the air was clean, and for all practical considerations, unpolluted. the ground was another matter though. plastic and garbage greeted us everywhere we went, including at supposedly secluded places like the tse chok ling monastery and gulaba enroute rohtang. i cringed and cribbed each time i saw plastic, almost reaching boiling point when a bunch of plastic bags ruined what was otherwise a stunning view of a river on the route to rohtang. the cribbing continued till i reached a wine shop and bought booze for the night's party, and realized that thanks to the recent ban on plastic bags, we would have to lug six bottles up the hill to our guest house. then i cribbed for the lack of a solution for this problem. I guess im too used to civilization. And it is an interesting problem, since my attitude is hypocritical in that i was using tons of plastic back in bangalore for my convenience, yet was demanding that the local populace not use any at all so that when i visit their neck in the woods (when i get tired of bangalore), i should have a decent view. dont expect me to become an eco activist overnight, but i'm guessing i'll spend more than a thought in this direction in future.

Tiger Eye Guest House - Even lonely planet didnt catch this one, despite it being in existence for ten years. we stumbled on it by accident thanks to the efforts of mr Piles, and immediately ditched the popular dragon guest house in old manali that we were considering till then. sure, the dragon had a better garden and view, but this was something else. the approaches to this place looked like something out of the movie roja, the terrorist camps to be specific. narrow gullys bordered by old wooden houses, cowsheds and firewood piled high led us to this gem of a place to stay in. the caretaker was a lovely old lady who mothered us to the point that even the normally rambunctious mr Piles was reluctant to party before she went off to sleep, in order to avoid gaining her disapproval.

Man U - Im surrounded by manchester united fans. Im the lone Gunner+Barca Fan in a sea of Man U idiots. two such Man U fans were travelling with me, and kept pointing out others who were wearing Man U merchandise. I've always wanted to pull their mightier-than-thou legs, and looking at my friend nithin's Man U skull cap, i may finally have the answer : man chested uniter.. saying something gay sounding like that should surely ruffle their feathers. Addendum : that backfired worse than a north korean rocket. they were ruffled, but recovered quickly to attack both my clubs, Arse-anal, and B-arse-a. Damn. I should think these things through.

Planning - How much of a trip should be planned? should it be micromanaged to the last detail, or should there be no planning at all? I guess we saw both sides of that in this trip. It was fun that we didnt have any initial plans except to find snow and make a peg of whisky with it, but then it wasn't fun that we couldnt go to the kibber monastery and lahoul-spiti since we forgot to check up on something as elementary as the prevailing weather conditions there before we set off. The lonely planet book was useful, admittedly, but the fun parts of this trip, as well as other trips we're done, were the ones where planning never even entered the picture. it is a bit of a dilemma then, since neither proper planning nor the near complete absence of it can guarantee a successful trip. of course, if it really came down to me, i'd burn the book, hop on my bike and go, most likely having forgotten my repair kit at home.

The rain - sometimes i hate the fuckin rain. sure, it was really really pretty to see the hills bathed in a freezing foggy drizzle interspersed with hailstorms, but on the other hand it ruined my planned paragliding session. Just as we reached the Solang valley for a short and expensive bout of paragliding, everything turned gray and murky and no paragliding happened. even if the rain had nearly killed me by starting after id taken off for paragliding, i wouldnt've held a grudge, id probably have cheered.

Horses - cliche, but beautiful creatures. i felt a bit guilty about having to use them for the trek up to the ski slopes, but since there were no other modes of transport available except for foot and a ridiculously overpriced maruti gypsy combined with the fact that we were four slackers with weak lungs and hardly any exercise, there was no option. we would never have been able to drag the heavy ski equipment up the hills on foot anyway. I had a nice horse whose name i couldnt catch from the incoherent speech of our guide, so i christened him gandalf since he was white and since i had forgotten the name of gandalfs horse anyway. and he liked to eat ice so the convoy stopped at his whim quite a few times much to my amusement and glee. it must also be mentioned here that we had a moment of sheer terror when something (we believe inappropriate advances by its rider, pylee) irked the horse at the end of the convoy and sent him running along with the rest of the horses. we held on for dear life while the guide managed to catch up and slow them down. i may now have a vague idea of the stuff cowboys are made off.

Kids - we had nine of them for company on the train trip to delhi. And ill miss them all. one looked like the kid from little miss sunshine, another like the 'there is no spoon' kid from the matrix. each had enough mischief up their sleeve to terrorize a fair sized town, so nine in a coach was pretty intense. pylee literally had kids trying to hang on to his long hair, and that is only a slight exaggeration. but they made the journey loads of fun, and we played cards, hide and seek and generally engaged in a lot of delirious nonsense that these tiny ones were able to create out of thin air. 36 hours flew by, and at the end we'd all grown kinda attached to each other that a coupla the kids wanted to take us home with them.

The mandatory funny story - each time my school friends and i go on trips like this, one or the other old obscure story gets dug out. this time it wasnt my turn, thankfully, but the story is funny as hell. this was when we were in tenth standard, and tuition on weekend afternoons were the norm. one of our friends, for privacy's sake we'll call him VK, had dialup internet at his house, and it was a novelty then, and it also meant we had access to porn. so the guys would all gather at his house after tuitions and wait patiently while dialup brought up the pictures one pixel at a time. then it was distributed via floppy disks. so one day, another friend was called up by VK. he claimed to have found the ultimate in computer technology, he could erase the clothes off a clothed girls pic. the second friend in question, N, was naturally intrigued and went over to see. and VK opens microsoft picture editor, and using a blur tool of some sort, starts working on a pic of some actress. he started scratching downwards with the mouse starting at her neck.

the folly was realized when they passed the area where her nipples should have been, and the two quickly figured they were merely spreading the colour from her neck. legend has it that VK kept trying until he almost got to her waist, but ill put that down to exaggeration. sitting in the balcony of tiger eye guest house with a few beers at night, this story popped up, and i am happy to report that beer, like milk, can come out your nose.

a few short ones..

skiing - looks easy, deceptively easy. bloody tough. falling is not fun, and getting up is even less fun.

apple cider - try it. try it. try it. beats beer any day. and i'm trying to figure out how to brew it :D

shooting stars - saw two on this trip, as opposed to 7 or 8 on the earlier goa one, and then forgot to wish on the second one. not that its worked so far.

himalayan trout - ranks in my top five fish, along with pearl spot, seer fish, crab and shark. and coming from a mallu for whom fish is vegetarian, you could believe the recommendation.

phones - not really necessary. i hope my boss wont read this on the blog.

this wouldve been longer, but i lost one sheet of paper with my notes on it. oh well, guess u were spared.

How to conduct a mature aerospace related conversation..

The following conversation ensued when two fanboys clashed over their favourite aircraft manufacturer. It demonstrates the extremely mature, civilized and constructive level of communication that helps drive the aerospace industry forward to newer levels of technological excellence. Constructive competition at its best, I would say, and perhaps even an example of a management school case study.


Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:33 PM]:
when u plannin to start on the ship?

L,B [7:33 PM]:
:D
L,B [7:33 PM]:
me donno.
L,B [7:33 PM]:
as yet.
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:33 PM]:
ok
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:34 PM]:
well if its not gonna be too late, ill join in with the as yet undecided aircraft
L,B [7:34 PM]:
oooooooh! the boeing
L,B [7:35 PM]:
;)
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:35 PM]:
over my dead body
L,B [7:35 PM]:
[ heartbroken smiley]

L,B [7:35 PM]:
[airplane smiley]
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:35 PM]:
[airplane smiley] = airbus
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:36 PM]:
[random pointless smiley] = boeing
L,B [7:36 PM]:
i got it first.
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:36 PM]:
thats cos i was typing more..
L,B [7:36 PM]:
i was thinkin faster
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:36 PM]:
B-) = airbus fans ...
[Nerd Smiley] = boeing fans
L,B(IE10) [7:36 PM]:
:S
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:37 PM]:
:D
L,B [7:37 PM]:
:S=airbus users
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:37 PM]:
[enraged smiley] = boeing users
L,B [7:37 PM]:
:) = boeieng users.
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:37 PM]:
beat u to it..
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:37 PM]:
[party smiley] = airbus users
L,B [7:37 PM]:
[snail smiley] =airbus
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:38 PM]:
[trash can smiley] = boeing
L,B [7:38 PM]:
[wilted rose] airbus
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:38 PM]:
:'( boeing crybabies
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:39 PM]:
we should save this conversation as an example of the mature way in which corporate folks communicate with each other.. could be an IIM case study
L,B [7:39 PM]:
the [sun smiley] never shines on airbus
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:39 PM]:
[lightbulb smiley] at least they have good ideas
L,B [7:39 PM]:
run baby run!!!
L,B [7:40 PM]:
boeing impliments them.
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:40 PM]:
nope. and airbus fans have a better grasp of spelling, too
L,B [7:40 PM]:
tis of no matter.
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:41 PM]:
it does show a higher rate of intelligence amongst the average airbus fans, when compared to boeing fans
L,B [7:42 PM]:
oh......run from the matter at hand.....boy......!
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:42 PM]:
what was the matter at hand?
L,B [7:43 PM]:
[wilted rose smiley] airbus
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:43 PM]:
[sheep smiley] boeing is the blacksheep of the aerospace industry.. always comin up with useless stuff
L,B [7:45 PM]:
they use their brains.........not the other end...
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:45 PM]:
well they use their brains for pretty much the same function as the other end.. thats the problem
L,B [7:46 PM]:
airbus doesnt even know the difference.....
L,B [7:46 PM]:
between the two ends...
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:47 PM]:
thats cos they're using both ends correctly.. they dont need to know the difference as long as each is doing its function
L,B [7:48 PM]:
which is the same???
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:48 PM]:
in a sense yes.. they beat the crap outta boeing products either way
L,B [7:50 PM]:
oh! you mean they beat the crap out of both ends either way,
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:51 PM]:
yes, with a minor detail. they beat the crap outta boeing
L,B [7:51 PM]:
while boeing has a different game to play!
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:51 PM]:
yeah, the game called lets-build-an-airplane-that-we-cant-even-get-to-fly
L,B [7:52 PM]:
oh u mean the airbus game-price the plane higher then it can fly!
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:53 PM]:
well, people are paying up, so they must be gettin their money's worth..
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:53 PM]:
they sold more planes than your little tin pot airplane company, y'know..
L,B [7:53 PM]:
its a company thats cheating people for all its worth....
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:54 PM]:
yes, boeing is, i know.
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:54 PM]:
on 07/08/07 they rolled out an empty shell and called it a plane :D
Asokan, Aravind (Design Innovation) [7:54 PM]:
that was cheating


oh who am i kidding. things went rapidly downhill.. one of these days, we're gonna solve our differences in a duel to the death. i have visions of a specially modified a340 for carpet bombing duties over a little village in goa.
the identity of the other fanboy has been protected, btw.

How to kill time with the Great Circle Mapper

So i was having a slow afternoon. Slow enough that i started playing around on the great circle mapper, which for the uninitiated is this cool web based app that plots the route between two airports along the great circle on the surface of the earth that connects them.

Which is boring to almost all of humanity except aviation geeks who have reached level 9.9 and above, so i decided to start my own fictional airline. Of course, since im dreaming, i decided to add my own twist to it. All my flights would connect only city pairs that lie along a great circle route that connects them via the north pole, which would make my airline's route map a pretty thing to look at. Which led me to some interesting discoveries. Bombay and Montrose in Colorado, USA, pretty much lie on one such route. So my inaugural flight would connect these two overflying the north pole. yaay, i think.

anadyr, one of the easternmost cities in russia, would connect to melilla in spain. i didnt even know these cities existed, but google maps is an invaluable tool. i was attempting to connect petropavlovsk kamtchatskiy (a place i hope to visit someday) to tenerife (another place i hope to visit someday) but then tweaking the route got me anadyr and melilla, and im sorely tempted to add them to my places to visit list just for the heck of it.

other interesting routes included bangalore to rapid city, usa, and nagasaki to godthab(capital of greenland), and bangkok to roanoke(where my brother is currently), and fairbanks (arpt code FAI) to cairo (CAI). of course, my airline would financially dive bomb in a way that would make the Douglas Dauntless proud, but hey, at least i'd have put more thought into my routes than a certain Mr Mallya :D



Here's the Pretty Route Map. I promise i'll try not to be this bored ever again.

:P

A weird day in the life of...

i woke up dreaming i was being strangled. whenever a dream wakes me up it usually has some correlation with real life. when i dream that my head is being banged against a table, there's usually someone banging on the door, if i dream of flooding, it usually means i left the bathroom tap open last night when there was no water and now that morning brought water its overflowing. strangulation and drowning usually meant i was in the middle of an asthma attack. not that it bothered me much, my canister of instant relief was lying by my bedside. a coupla shots, and im back to superman. except this time i'm wrong, the inhaler is on my office table, amongst the multitude of junk that i've accumulated there, like a magpie's nest. and this usually means i have to go out to the nearest medical store, and get a new one. fair enough, i think, and begin to get up, only i can't get up. whoever was strangling me in the dream had already done a bloody good job. the bike was out of the question, and a hospital enters the equation, much to my dislike.

i pick up my phone, another bedside object, and call the number for a cab which a friend had once kindly given me when i was stuck with a flat tyre in the middle of the night a few weeks ago. i lay around taking deep breaths till the cab comes, recovering enough to walk down. its always like a video game, if i stay still, i get back some of my health points and can move about a bit. only i cant stay still till i recover completely, that would take the bloody day. the cab is here, i put a sweater on, realize i dont need it, but keep it on anyway, and begin moving down the stairs like a seventy year old. and my wheezing would put the nilgiri steam train to shame. three hours of wires, tubes and needles pass by as a blur, and the medics have restored me to full health. i can resume the game again, and the phone is already ringing with my next mission.

its a friend, who was till recently a neighbour. i dont tell her that ive just been patched up, lest she not give me the mission. she is a biker, and had arranged for her bike to be sent to delhi from here, and turns out the courier guy was now untraceable with no news on the whereabouts of the bike that was sent ten days ago. the bike isn't worth all that much monetarily, at least compared to mine, but i understand her plight immediately since she probably values it more than i do mine in terms of sentimental value.

so its back to the house, on to my own faithful steed, and off to office to print out her email with the details of the courier and to go snoop around. what fun, a real life detective story. except of course, its no cakewalk. there's obstacles to be taken care of first. i'm also a juggler on the side, and i have three projects on my act. and one of those, a short week's assignment, ends tomorrow and i havent started on it, and have been evading the boss' call for a discussion the last coupla days. which means that if i don't show him something today, i'm screwed. dont get me mistaken, i dont usually bother to give deadlines too much respect. if i meet them, i meet them, if not, well, too bad.. which probably explains why all the aero engineers that gave anonymous feedback on me as part of our appraisal process said the same thing : he knows enough about airplanes that we can't fool him and make our work easier (and his difficult, conversely), but he needs to manage his time better. as you can see, our attitudes on deadlines didnt really agree. so this short assignment was supposed to be my coup-de-grace, coming up with what was supposed to be insanely good stuff in a week, and in a week only. and i was on the verge of botching it.

so the first thing to do in office, obviously, is to run to the copier machine, grab some A3 sheets, and sketch like it was the end of the world. or the end of design, at least. of course, without any ideas no amount of sketching would come to anything, so i was forced to take time out, drink copious amounts of coffee, super strong, and then put my brain into overdrive to find a few vague notions around which i could make my living. with a sum total of three such notions in hand half an hour later, i start sketching again, all the time realizing that quick sketches were not much more than doodles, and that a paper napkin would do more justice to these than the A3 that i was wasting. either way, i was spinning stories in my mind to sell these, a lot depended on it. the mission of finding the missing bike seemed like it was long ago, though i was itching to help her out.

in the end, the obstacles were cleared. turns out the deadline got extended, and i was never told of the same cos they wanted to keep me on a tight leash. needless to say, they were more than surprised at the work i came up with, but on the flip side there's more to keep me tied down in the days to come. but that's a different story, for a different day. at about six, when i could justifiably say that i had done enough to keep my day's pay as a designer and could now moonlight as a part time private investigator, i stepped out of office. only to find a wall of water. it was raining in a way noah could relate to, and i wasn't noah. i'd shaved my beard a while ago. and i have a love-hate relationship with the rain, which was now tilting significantly in the direction of fanatical hatred. thanks to an errant dry cleaner, my life protecting armor that is a black and yellow jacket had been parted from me for the last one week, and having recently recovered from an asthma attack, i probably shouldnt be anywhere near the cold rain. dejected, i called my friend up and said that i would have to defer the mission by a day, weather permitting. turns out she doesnt know too many other moonlighting investigators in bangalore, especially ones unhindered by rain, so i kept my case.

the rest of the evening was hide and seek with the rain. when the rain finally hid, i hopped on the bike and made a dash for it, straight into the floodwaters on bannerghatta road. having literally drowned on this road once, bike and all, i had quite a time getting to dry ground. the rain hid long enough to lull me into a sense of security. i stopped for dinner on the road, and took my time eating and then having the routine chai. then, just as i got on my bike for the home run, all hell broke loose. the rain came down in bucketfuls, and i was soaked before i could find a bus shelter or shop to take refuge in. so, soaked to my underwear and cold to my bones, i rode on home in a crabby mood. sure enough, there was no power at home which meant that my favourite activity of wasting time on the internet was out of the question, so i got even crabbier, till i finally decided to get some candles from the nearby grocer's. in the candlelight, i noticed a murakami book lying around, one that i had wanted to read but wasn't able to find the time for. in a final effort to make something out of my day, i started reading it by the candlelight. and for the first time in a while, felt really good. i was fighting the urge to sleep and allowed the book to grip me, the candle flickering and dancing and adding to the ambience. it went on for hours. and just as i was enjoying myself for the first time in the day, the power came back, and bathed everything in the antiseptic light from the CFL. the mood was ruined, i got back to believing there was a grand conspiracy against me with even the electricity board involved. even the candle seemed to be mocking me by thwarting the attempts of the now enlivened fan to extinguish it. so i started writing this.

what a brilliant-lousy day.

not on my watch

i was on my usual commute to office, made dreary by the fact that i was riding in my friend's car, and my mind began wandering at the traffic stops. almost simultaneously my friend and i spotted a guy riding pillion on a scooter checking his watch for the time. that's when the thought struck me.. where did all the watches go? when did watches stop being cool?

i stopped wearing one two years back, and most people around me arent wearing one, now that i think of it. i relied on other means for the time, i guess. and that meant either the computer i was sitting in front of, or the mobile phone i carried. i guess i must have subconsciously thought that carrying two devices with overlapping purposes was kinda redundant. but i still never imagine a day would come when i'd have nothing on my left wrist, not even the tell-tale tan mark that appears on days your watch has to meet its maker for repairs to its magical innards.
that magic was what attracted me to watches in the first place. i can remember when i was six, i yearned for a watch. one, maybe two guys in class had one. the situation wasn't much different when i turned eight. thats when i got my first watch, and a digital one at that. it was nothing fancy, dad had bought it for 45 bucks on an official trip to chennai, but i was proud of it to the extent that i resented that my brother, younger to me by a year, got one at seven years of age. it had a basic rectangular dial that displayed nothing more than the time, and it had an alarm feature that needed a monkey's fingers to operate, and emitted a squeak so feeble that mice would have called it a noob. but, oh coolest of cool, it had a reflective golden glass all around that dial, and easily won all those contests where we reflected sunlight off the dials and onto the walls to see whose reflections were the best.

my first proper watch was gifted to me by my grandmother. again, my brother got an identical one, but by now i had resigned myself to my fate :D. my grandfather had got the two watches as mementos after attending some united nations function, and in the dial it had a pretty detailed world map. there were no numbers to indicate the hour or minute, just needles over a map. and i thought it was wicked cool, and i remember pretending that it was a compass and that i was navigating with the world map printed on it. but sadly, this watch wasnt built to last on the arm of an eleven year old schoolkid whose mom had (oh horror) considered nicknaming him chanchal since he just couldnt sit still. the watch just fell to bits.

this was also the first watch whose innards i saw. i considered myself pretty smart at that age, in that i understood how an electric motor worked, and i had made a few toys using motors. but the inside of a watch stumped me. it posed the biggest challenge to understand how it worked, and to date im not sure i have it licked. and to add to my misery, all sorts of watches started pouring in.. self winding ones, temperature powered ones, motion powered ones.. it was always easy explaining the digital watch with a sort of ghost-in-the-machine explanation, but the universe of cogwheels inside conventional watches transfixed me for years, now that i think of it..

i also owned an hmt, which was the first proper watch that my dad bought me. i remember going to the watch shop with a budget of one thousand in mind, big money for a 14 year old, and looking at the maze of watches. it was the time when the ugly(in retrospect), outsize g-shock watches had captured our collective imaginations, and everything from timers to databanks were going into a watch. we talked excitedly about the day when you could watch tv on a watch, blissfully unaware of that usurper, the mobile phone. i looked long and hard at a casio digital watch that came for eight hundred, but i settled for the hmt that was for five hundred fifty. dont ask me why. my next watch was a gift from my aunt when i finished my plus two and got admitted to nid. it stayed on and off with me through those years, and now lies discarded in a corner of my room.

the last encounter i had with my watch was when i purchased one for my father. i decided to go in for a reasonably priced citizen watch, not too cheap, not too flashy either. i dont know if he wears it, but the fact of the matter is that he had three gifted watches lying around at that time. i havent bothered to check either.

and the coolest memory i have is of my first watch. it didnt last me more than 45 days, and at roughly 1 rupee per day, it didnt really pay for itself by the standards of those days. but when it died, i swear it did a sort of countdown.. the minute display went from 07 to 00 and then it went blank. that made my day, setting of my imagination in the direction of rocket launches..and the fact that it happened in the sixth period, one of the dreariest in the afternoon, ensured that i remember it to this day.and no other watch was worth more to me.

so where did my watches go? i have no idea. why did i give up on them? or have i given up on them? i cant come up with any specific thing against watches, nor do i think they are uncool. maybe i just got too caught up in the problems of reality to be able to spare time for the mysterious innards of a timekeeping machine.
i guess these watches were defining certain milestones in my life, though it may sound like an old hmt ad. which got me thinking, whats the next? oh yeah, i havent got a watch for myself, with my own money. that's the one left. one of these days... :)


edit : funnily enough, when i sent this out to friends on gmail, adsense placed ads for russian pilots' watches.. i wonder if its trying to tell me something :P

on stories..

what does it mean to be able to write? the question was rhetorical, so dont bother. its about telling a tale, i think. i guess i have to explain. i have a friend who spent a bit of time in germany. when he returned to India, i asked him if he felt like returning at all, if felt like he wanted to live there. now, this was not in the usual abroad-is-best mentality us indians have, it was more because he was an aspiring automobile designer, and germany is obviously one of the automotive heavens on earth. but he said no, which surprised me. and his justification surprised me more.
he compared a simple day-to-day activity as it happens in germany with the way it happens in india. in germany, if you wanted to go grocery shopping, you stepped out of your building and onto the quiet street, wait in line for the quiet bus ride to the market, buy what you want, often pay to a machine and not a man, repeat bus ride to return home. even the cars that followed for a while behind the bus would maintain the exact same gap between themselves no matter what the speed. not a sound, not a step out of line. then he said, look at the same activity in india. you get out of your house and onto the street, most likely to realize you stepped on a cow-pie, run after the bus and when it slows to avoid a pedestrian, you jump aboard and get a toehold on the footboard with 20 other people, hanging on for dear life till u nearly get caught in the stampede alighting at the market, only to have a fierce argument short of fisticuffs with the grocer to save half a rupee on the onions, repeat bus ride and reach home, only for a passing car to splash you with mud right at your gate, and you enter your house to figure that the electricity board decided the time was auspicious for a power cut. at the end of the you can sit with a friend or significant other and tell them a story, the story of how you went and got groceries. the story that would be told in india is far more interesting than what could be told in germany, he said, and that at the end of the day, he would rather live with the stories than any amenity the developed world can provide.

that was a sort of moment of clarity for me. i have often discussed with myself as well as a few friends the importance of what you write. am i here to merely report what i see? is that level of objective honesty required? i'm tending to think not. i mean, when i run out of fuel on my bike and have to push it a kilometer, there is a difference between whats happening and what i'm experiencing. in my mind, the goggles of imagination are on, and im living an outrageous adventure that very minute. i mean, who runs out of fuel on a bike with a digital fuel gauge? so i tell the story with all the bells and whistles that i see. its far better than walking in with a dour face and saying 'crap, i ran outta fuel on the bike, pushed it a mile and am all tired out now'. i'd much rather walk in with a sheepish grin and tell the story of how i got stranded, silliness galore.

that does not mean i spin my tales either. while the bells and whistles enhance certain parts and obfuscate others, by no means am i telling a fallacy. there are no absolute facts, there are only interpretations. there is a theory on photons that states that you can only observe either the momentum or the position of the photon at one time (I stumped Lopez, our revered physics teacher with that one, i would know :P). by observing one, you are changing the other. i think a variant of that holds true for everything in life. by observing facts, i may have colored them forever with my interpretation. and that, to me is what writing is all about. we all live in overlapping interpretative universes of our own, and i want mine to be funny and entertaining. Why? i dunno... maybe because it'll liven up those spaces where my universe meets yours.

whoever said that the universe is made up of stories and not atoms, was telling the truth.

have fun. wtf?

y'know what pisses me off? when people say, "have fun". now this is a multi-faceted piss-off weapon, mind you. On one level, it's dumb. I dont know any human being who doesn't want to have fun. Sure, the definitions may vary, but everyone has fun in his or her own way. i mean, even psychopaths do, cos cutting people into kheema might be their idea of fun, even if its not necessarily yours. Manic-depressives are also having fun cos their twisted idea of fun may be to not be happy. So its like saying "breathe", cos you're going to anyway.
Another thing is abuse of this phrase. While it is inherently pointless, people take it one further level by using it whenever and wherever possible. whether you're going to work, to watch a movie, or to get an amputation done on a gangrenous limb that has three bullets embedded in it, people say the same ol' stuff. "have fun".
Now this is a code-red 'wtf?' situation as far as im concerned. it always leaves me with a question for the user of the phrase, that starts with wtf. like 'wtf has this guy got for brains?' or, 'wtf is mother nature smoking?'and wtf situations have only one cure. turn the tables on them. so the next time someone says "have fun", just say :

"No, thanks. I have other plans."


That was a public service announcement aimed at improving office environments in midwestern america. Thank you.

peel it off, dammit.

i have a confession to make. i take pleasure from some pretty weird things in life. now, before you dream up visions of me tied up and in fluffy handcuffs, allow me to clarify. i like peeling the plastic protective wrapping off, well, just about anything. it probably ranks on round about the same level as busting bubble-wrap, but this ones better i say. there is a strange satisfaction when u feel the plastic peeling off the mobile phone screen or laptop body it was protecting, something that cant be described in words. just the way you hate it when chalk squeaks on a glass board in class, which is a pretty inoccuous thing if you take a detached look at it. thats about as close to an analogue as i can possibly come, though its in an entirely different league and direction altogether. of course, admitting it wasn't pretty easy, because the world and i are at odds regarding our views on this particular breed of plastic. most people dont realize the fact that this was meant to be peeled off. i mean, if hewlett-packard wanted the stuff to stay, they probably would have made it more difficult to peel off. but what to folks do? they dont touch that plastic. like some sort of a strange ritual that would be sacrilegious to break, they let that plastic be. not being designed to stick forever, the plastic starts coming off the edges. at this point, it looks to addicts like me that its begging to be peeled off, and when i, in turn, beg the owner of the particular piece of plastic the honor of peeling it off, i invariably get rejected. what beats me is the fact that people keep that protective plastic till its hanging off the laptop or curled up on a mobile screen, looking ugly, getting in the way of everything, yet somehow in the minds of the owner, 'protecting' whatever it was pasted on.

the saddest part is that after this goes on for months even, after much attempts at sticking it back and much requests on my part to be allowed to peel it off, the stupid thing falls off, and they dont even realize its happened. motherfucking sadists, im usually telling myself at this point. the only things that plastic did in its life was gather dust on its sticky part and curl up ruining the looks on an otherwise beautiful laptop or phone. i mean, its a catch22 right there. most people, whether they admit it or not, buy things giving huge weightage on how the thing looks. and then, in the name of protection, re-sale value and some other loads of bullcrap, keep it covered in hideous contraptions of cheap plastic or latex, never enjoying or flaunting the beauty of whatever it is that they bought. i mean, whats the point in buying a phone worth a good part of my paycheque and then keeping it in a ten rupee latex cover that looks like its a condom tied up? flaunt it, and let me peel the plastic, i say.

but then the world order isnt going to change easy when it comes to protective plastic sheets. i mean, what does a guy like me do in a world of sadists? oh i know what i'll do. guerilla warfare. the plastic revolution is coming. what exactly am i talking about? oh yeah.. nowadays i dont ask the owners their permission. i just walk up and say, 'dude, that's a cool laptop'. and peel it right off, before they even dream it coming. of course, the gratification is a bit accelerated, but turning the sadist tables right back on them sorta makes up for it. the key part of this guerilla maneuver is the getaway. for a successful getaway, hand the plastic back to the stunned owner. the instinctive reaction is to try and stick it back. the impossibility of that takes some time to sink in, ample time for a getaway. oh yeah, there are pre-emptive strikes in this war, too. sometimes when i go to the electronics sections in malls, i conduct large scale attacks on plastic. for all i know, i may be ridding the world of a lot more sadists.

i have no idea why i wrote this, its somehow been botherin me for a while now. and if you just bought a laptop or a phone, you know where to find me.

slam wham and bamboo man

dear reader (I'm all into north Korea now, y'know, dear leader, get it ? get it? .. oh u blasted morons),

allow me to begin by stating, for the record, that i know sweet jack-shit about bamboo. or crafts. or weaving. except weaving through heavy traffic. no, that's not entirely true. what i meant to say is that i have no useful knowledge of bamboo. or the rest of the thingamajigs i mentioned. as for useless knowledge, i have lots of it. especially about bamboo. when i was five or six, my weapon of choice for all my imaginary adventures was a 4 foot bamboo pole. my other weapon was a Kalashnikov automatic, but it had a habit of staying only in my imaginary world. then one day i was forced to give up the pole for the good of the society as it was urgently required to kill a harmless water snake some old neighbour lady found in her garden. it was returned smeared in snake blood, so i threw it away believing that snake blood brought curses with it. also i guess i was rather disappointed by the fact that my weapon of choice actually worked, unlike me. well, the curse of bamboo was to hit me much later in life.
after a few months in nid, which by the way was after many years out of touch with bamboo, my knowledge of the material increased. i got to know for instance that it was invented by MP Ranjan in the wood workshop and that right as i was lazing around in class, scientists around the world were figuring out how to use it to build roads, microchips and spacecraft. also when i went to buy the Hindi dub of the Matrix from Bhadra Fort with a friend whose purpose in life seemed to be bringing Hollywood to Bihar, i also discovered that there's an interestingly titled Hindi movie called 'tamboo me bamboo'. Suffice to say i was impressed, but having chosen aerospace to make my career, i couldn't see myself travelling in a bamboo aircraft (maybe we could have that movie in-flight but no more). and neither did i think I'd ever have anything to do with this wonder material, i was happy doing mundane stuff. well boy was i wrong! nid has an ingenious method of bringing people like me to places where they shouldn't be. its called a craft documentation. and lo, i find myself in thick jungle swatting mosquitoes and looking for bamboo. well, not really. i was in a resort in Coorg that had a handicraft unit, and i was figuring out how to classify ash trays made from bamboo as a traditional Indian craft. and i couldn't. so i invented a craft. and well, got away with it, sorta. but i still have this niggling fear that even as we speak, there may be armies of NGOs equipped with my document headed to Coorg to study this new craft.
along the way i found a partner in crime, Sachin. just as ignorant and unscrupulous as i am. about bamboo that is. so after the craft documentation/invention/field study adventure, we were reminiscing on the old days when like retired superheroes, we were called to action again. the bad guy was a freelance project that we needed to take down immediately. well, dangerous job, very vague understanding, and good money. what were we waiting for? we landed in a remote village in Kerala. hell, i didn't even know Kerala had remote villages. the village could be accessed via auto rickshaw or a river crossing on a boat, and we chose the latter so that when our superhero adventures are brought out by DC comics, they can romanticize our hardship.
i found out that the work had something to do with weaving and helping the women there to make products from woven bamboo strips. so i told them that sachin's a great expert in weaving, everything short of telling them he's post-graduated in weaving. i was safe. but well, being as unscrupulous as i am, he got his own back. i came to know that I'm the dyeing expert. the only dye i ever saw was the sort you apply on your hair, and the sum total of my expertise was applying stripes of the stuff on a stray dog and christening him 'tiger'. but then verbal gymnastics came as a default feature when i was born, like air bags on Mercs. so i figured i could weather the storm. after all, i am a survivor of seven juries under very taxing circumstances that would make a holocaust survivor proud. but then bamboo is jinxed for me. i figured wrong. The conversation went something like this :

One of the weavers : "Sir will this dye do?"
Now, she's holding a packet of some obscure looking substance that looks black in colour and I'm mentally debating my options.
I shoot, borrowing heavily from my association (read : having chai at bmw) with textile students : "I've worked only with chemical dyes.."
Weaver : "Sir this is chemical.. "
Me, shooting randomly now that my ploy has backfired : "I meant cloth dyes.."
Weaver : "Sir, this is cloth dye, we have no other dye in the local town market.."
Me, under heavy strain from the double backfire: "ahm.. well, i suppose we don't have a choice then.. "
If DC Comics ever bring out my superhero story, I'm now willing to bet they'd call it Adventures of Captain Obvious and Sneaky Sidekick.

Jim Morrison once said "I see myself as an intelligent and sensitive guy with the soul of a clown, which forces me to blow it at the most critical moments". This is especially true in my case, for i am rarely far from foul-ups. The sense of impending disaster regarding this project had set off more alarm bells in my head than riding pillion with Saurabh Deb on a motorcycle carrying two Powerbooks.

But I suppose it can be stated here that I managed the dyeing admirably enough to be made chairman of Bombay dyeing, save the fact that after all my sweating over the fire and in the sun the stupid dye did a weird sort of boil-dance and went 'pffffff' leaving my white pants in green polka dots. Oh yeah, it was only after i added the dye to water did i figure what colour it finally was. All along I was under the impression that it was yellow. And thank God that those weavers didn't know enough about dyes to ask questions that would have stumped me. I dunno what i would have told the poor devils who wished me a sing-song "good morning sir" every morning. And thanks to the devil too, for we had to dye bamboo on the exact same days i chose to wear white trousers. And I dont fancy green trousers.

But then fate is not all that bad. Even while engaged in the biggest foul up in the middle of nowhere, i could have the last laugh. It so happened that there are people in this world foolish enough to believe that I am employable and that proved to be my score against Sachin for making me the dyeing expert with green polka dotted trousers. I had to leave in the middle of things as i was urgently required as arch-nemesis for the multinational conglomerate that was foolish enough to offer me employment, and he is busy trying to figure out the bamboo spaceship i promised them he'd be building for them. Last heard, he was trying to teach them about tetrahedrons in an effort to distract them, but i have sold them the dream of becoming TASA (Thiruvananthapuram Aeronautics and Space Administration) so i guess he isnt meeting with much success. Mwahahahahahah, or what . And for the record, it felt good becoming and instant-mix furniture-textile-product designer in the face of overwhelming odds. I didnt know my design morals were that flexible; four years spent being ultra-condescending towards textile and furniture designers went down the drain when faced with money. Now that that's out of the way it wont be too hard kissing some boss ass to climb the metaphorical ladder.

I suppose i can now peacefully figure out how to go about correcting the mistake of the poor sods who thought i was employable. If I'm successful, the world would be rid of one more Fortune 500 company.


PS - I believe women should be chained to the kitchen, preferably naked. If that whole article didn't emphasize my political incorrectness, I hope this last sentence restored my credentials.

PS2 - This is a semi-fictional work of satire. The fictional parts are a closely guarded secret.

PS3 - Out in stores now. I want one for my birthday.