‘HAPPY’ ‘HOLI’DAYS??? HMMM…

Amazing how simple punctuation marks can add a totally new dimension to an otherwise simple-looking word, isn’t it? Unfortunately, that doesn’t apply positively to the first word of the title for this post. When home’s ‘close’ to 2000 long kilometers away (Ah, the magic of punctuation marks!!!), travel’s obviously a huge pain the (Nah, nah, nah! Naughty, naughty!) NECK (literally). And the recent trip back home most certainly QED’d Murphy’s Law. First up, my flight from good ol’ Delhi is at six in the morning, which means I had to leave from the hostel at ten the previous night, with colour, water and, later (when the I’ve-had-only-3-pegs-but-I-don’t-know-what’s-with-today’s-ethyl-alcohol lunatics ran out of their pukka (i.e., permanent) colour) mud being slung, in (the pun is so intended) mile-high spirits. I had to postpone my departure from half-past eight to ten just because I didn’t want to sacrifice my beautiful bright-green-with-a-blue-back T-shirt (useless details)- not to the colours but to the (a la our amazing Sallu) unforgiving mobs who seemed to be hell-bent on proving that cotton, terrycot and polyester aren’t greatly tear-free. As I tiptoed out with Ani, and after (as usual) penning in a few witty lines in the leave register, we left for the bus-stand (Bustee in insti-lingo), hoping for a comfortable ride where we could at least catch a few forty winks.

Murphy’s Law QED No.1.

We find a nice and shiny Uttar Pradesh State Transport Corp. air-conditioned bus and board it joyously (which was after a few minutes of bargaining with our rickshaw-wallah). As soon as we step in, I smell some unfortunate past passenger’s motion sickness and quickly move to the back (On the way, by the way, I had to politely wake up a guy with REALLY smelly socks to get his legs out of the way.) of the bus, silently appreciating the seems-to-be-OK air-conditioning. 10 minutes in, more smelly socks find their way up to the seats as some prepare to sleep. I put my bag right up to my nose and try to sleep straightaway. But, then, comes the oh-so-brilliant movie and I quickly realized the negatives of having the world’s biggest film industry. A Z-grade movie with some failed villain (who has been in the news a lot, for the wrong reasons, though) as the hero and some never-seen-before-and-I-so-don’t-want-to-again heroines ‘acting’ in some dumb movie with a dumber name and one of the dumbest plots ever (clichés galore), which successfully manages to rid me totally of sleep in its what-was-it three or four really long hours of runtime. Thankfully, I was fortunate enough that the bus didn’t have any other dumb movie’s pirated DVDs to play and I could (not so peacefully, because of the stubborn I-refuse-to-bend-my-back seat) sleep till we reached the capital.

Murphy’s Law QED No. 2

We reach the Delhi airport (after freezing to death in the auto; it was an unusually cold spring night) at around half-past three (correction: morning?) and I find out that my flight’s cancelled due to “undeclared operational difficulties” (which, for me, translates to “Ha, ha, ha! I’m gonna screw you!”). I run around madly, almost exhausting my cellphone’s balance calling my parents over and over again (I’m on roaming, you see), requesting, and enquiring from, one officer after another, but all to no avail. All they guarantee me is a ticket to Hyderabad, from where I’ll have to somehow manage my way back to Vizag (Visakhapatnam, for the uninitiated). All kinds of people pestered the officers for a refund or a guaranteed ticket to Vizag from the city of pearls but our national carrier’s not-too-polite ground-staff refused to budge and, in fact, blamed me for being unprepared (Yeah, right. At half-past four in the morning! Hullo???). So, even after my repeated arguments that I can travel 12 hours on a train all alone, my mom books me on a connect from Hyderabad, costing me (on a low-cost?) an unreasonable four grand.

The nine days of the vacations passed off peacefully, with me not able to play Holi (I use ‘play’ and not ‘celebrate’ because I did have a nice time with the family but not the wild splashes one has with friends, so I can say I did celebrate Holi) for the second (or maybe third) year in a row (as I had to leave on the same day) but watching my brother come back all drenched, painted and splattered with egg whites and yellows all over his head and shirt (which didn’t exactly earn itself a right to be called one after the fiasco) did make my day, though. But, as it turns out, sequels don’t really stop at one.

Murphy’s Law QED No. 3

It’s a Saturday and it’s the holiday weekend (what with Thursday being Milad-ul-Nabi, Friday being Good and Saturday, Holi) so it really wasn’t the best of times to book a ticket on the Godavari Express (Vizag to Hyderabad; probably the busiest train on that route) just four days before the journey. Around two hours before the departure, I find out that I’m in the waiting list. Dad and I shoot off to the railway station to try and get some kind of adjustment (I’d use the right word later) but to no avail. Then, we loiter around the TTE’s resting area for around an hour and after a customary hand-out (a hundred-and-fifty bucks!), I’m assured a seat in sleeper class (with an AC ticket!). After a lot of running around in the train, and a number of frantic calls back home, I get a berth with a few fat government officers for company, who discussed everything under the sun from the effect of IPL on Test cricket and economics, in general (the all-pervading, omnipresent game that is our pseudo-national game!) to (in their opinion) an inevitable change in power in A.P. and at the centre, almost all of which I would have loved to keenly followed (and even participated in) had it not been for the fact that the discussions were in Telugu (which, although IS my mother tongue, is a language I’m not very adept at speaking in). An uneasy night followed, with the train’s rough seats and my filled-wth-Mom’s-delicious-Besan-ke-Laddu, space-consuming bags refusing to let me fall into the arms of Morpheus but I somehow did at around three or so in the morning (or night?).

(We don’t stop at a trilogy!)

Murphy’s Law QED No. 4

I wake up at five in the morning, expecting to see Secunderabad station soon enough. A walk for a quick brush reveals a dark outside view, with the sun still sluggish to come out of its cosy sleep. Around half an hour later, I switch on my mobile to check my location, fearing the worst. Meanwhile, a fellow passenger, who had preferred to doze while the great discussions were going on below (by the way, those officers were doing the same now!), woke up to start a conversation with me. Turned out his son was a BITSian and was now in the US of A. Great, I said, vaguely resembling a pig on the way to the butcher’s guillotine. He failed to cease, though and my only solace were the continous calls form home asking where I was. I’m usually a highly sociable person (ahem…) and I love striking conversations with anybodies, somebodies and nobodies on trains, buses, planes- everywhere. But, this wasn’t just the time. I somehow managed to remain courteous to the gentleman and at last, reached my destination 2 hours late.
Bang! Every single plan went BANG! The flight’s at 9:15, check-in ends at 8:45 and I’ve got to reach the new airport (I shall contain my excitement to describe it here) on a rainy Sunday morning traveling 32 kilometres! I walk out, drenched in seconds, to find an auto-rickshaw offering to go for six hundred rupees. On any other normal day, both me and Dad would have said, “Six hundred darned rupees! NO freakin’ way in Hell!” but in this case, after a re-check with Dad, I uttered an uncomfortable Yes. The driver uttered a barrage of expletives on the way when buses and speeding cars sploshed mud at us (and how!) but we managed to reach the new airport, somehow, on time.

OK. I’m in a hurry but I still stand to admire the beauty of the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, Shamshabad, Hyderabad and, incidentally, it was the day of commissioning of the airport! So, my name will be etched (hopefully in red and not golden letters; red’s my favourite colour) in history. I didn’t exactly have the time for a commemorative picture for the day but still enjoyed the chocolates and the rose (Ah! She looked really pretty in that red saree…Oops! We’re digressing, here!) and the whole airport mimicked KLIA (that’s Kuala Lumpur International Airport) to the core.

Nice and comfortable flight. Back to the airport at Delhi; not exactly relaxed but surely relieved. The return journey was much more enjoyable with a superb bus, two fellow Littas (RS and Atulya) and a wonderfully verbose professor of journalism for company.

As I sat back in my room (which was back to its messy, dusty best) and contemplated over the eventful trip back home, I, after nine months of observation, finally formulated Murty’s Law, whose statement is as follows,

The answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is Jugad, which, incidentally, adds up to 43. (when the letters are substituted by their respective numbers, i.e. A-1, B-2 and so on)

But, then, when I stated this great formulation to the revered 42 supporter, Saagar, he couldn't accept the fact that someone could wrong the (probably) second most divine number (after Phi, of course) and rightly pointed out that as the research took exactly NINE months (which is also, I believe, my lucky number), one could be subtracted from the answer giving, in the end, 42!

Yes, Douglas Adams got it right and I came close...

P.S.- This was a long, long post but actually, I really cut it short by not describing the journey back to Roorkee fully.

P.P.S.- Yes, Ashok. Even I wonder why I took so long to figure it out.

P.P.P.S.- Thanks, Saagar. You rule!

P.P.P.P.S.- All these
post-post-post-scripts scripts are highly irritating, aren't they? Especially after a long post!

You know it's spring...

It's March now and the cold, foggy, dark mornings have given way to pleasant, sunny and less groggy ones- the kind which don't let your conscience acquit you to leave for classes without a bath (although the exercise is still ignored with contempt)! Spring is here and with it has brought back the joys of life. The dried leaves (a la Mohabbatein) and withered flowers give way to colourful blooms. Those student society (surprisingly, a not-so-sociable-animal like yours truly happens to be in one too!) meetings which were either confined to the comfort of warm rooms or rescheduled to the afternoon slot, are now back refreshed in the pleasant evening near the beautiful gardens of the Senate building.

The onset of spring has also (somewhat) managed to bring back the poetic side of the author, who had almost lost this facet of his (ahem...) literary personality (excuse me?) in the cold winter gloom (Despite all the complaining, I iterate the fact that winter continues to be my second most-favourite season, after the rainy season)...

You know it's spring
when you don't crawl more into your quilt when the alarm rings,
but jump out of it to enjoy the beautiful morning,
as the koel joyously sings.

You know it's spring
when your mind is at its creative peak,
listening to the grass' chatter
and hear the trees speak.

They love it with their leaves back
to their bright green selves,
the dried brown leaves remembered
as they're put into history's dusty shelves.

The virus of optimism
strikes again, people infected at large;
they don't cry out in pain nor writhe in discomfort,
but smile and into the breeze they barge!

Out into the open, where the wind dances
in joy and welcomes back
its long-lost companion and bids goodbye
to the lazy winter slack.

You know it's spring
when your author's back with yet another stupid rhyme
intoxicated he is with the wine of delight,
and now, he's succeded in wasting 187 seconds of your time!

Normal service is resumed.

One of my New Years' resolutions (Yeah, I kinda believe in them but there's been enough hullabaloo on this earlier so I wouldn't clarify my stand. Rather, it would become pretty clear soon...) at the start of 2006 was to maintain a diary. That, I felt, would help me improve my vocabulary and make my brain a lil' less cluttered. But of course, this lazy fatso would have to pick his fat butt off that couch every night and fill up an unforgiving page of that book and that, seemingly, was too much of an ask. So, after 4 months (which included 2 months' pages filled up in two nights with some of the biggest alphabets I've ever written), I finally gave up on that.

That was just another of those resolutions I had solemnly pledged to stick to every year and had, thanks to my blissful slothfulness, again broken. This year, too, started off with a few resolutions but experience has made me a little smarter. I haven't yet given up on the idea of resolutions but have instead tried making them more practical for my indolent self.

But why am I talking resolutions more than 50 days after the start of the year?
Well, it turns out that this very page you've wandered onto was one of my resolutions for 2008. But, in accordance with my new-found wisdom, I resolved NOT to maintain a regularly-updated, critically-acclaimed and box-office-hit blog BUT just to start a blog; nothing to boast about. This explains (unasked for) the long hiatus.

Anyways, it's been quite a week gone by and quite a week to come and as always, the week after TS (test-series for the uninitiated) always gives one much to type about (if you have the time and patience for, of course, which I happen to have as I've been kicked out of a tutorial for arriving 123 seconds late). To continue on a cliched note, Mera TS kaafi theek-theek raha, un ghissuon se behtar thodi hoga? ("My TS went pretty well; obviously not better than those Ghissus"), which brings us to the oh-so-used word down here - Ghissu.

Sandwiched between Foci and Haddu in the insti lingo dictionary, Ghissu, although a frequently used word, occupies a very lowly place on the list for the most used words in our hostel (the only non-profane word above it being Chapo, which literally translates into a treat). It is a word used for those highly-hated (at most times except for when exams attack, when their fisrt-bench-compiled "super"notes come in handy) people (I deliberately avoid the use of "humans" or "Earthlings" since many of them are considered to be from other planets) who spend (a la ostriches) most of their time buried in course books (inviting the ire of most, exceptions being people of their ilk). They have a minimal social life(which extends from going to the mess for the essentials to attending classes, which they NEVER miss, and calls of nature) and are in total contrast to those who're only guests in their own rooms!

This word's usage attains a seasonal high in the days before and after TS. And as that is now, I have to be very liberal in my usage of the word because of people complaining about the word losing its novelty (we've been here over 6 months now) and thereby not being such a foci word to use after all! And also, with my TS having passed by theek-theek, I'm being barraged by the unflinching use of the word and it's difficult to pass through any social gathering without having to scratch the word out of your ears.

It brings about a self-introspection in me.

Am I a Ghissu? Nah, can't be. That's for losers with nothing better to do. But wait. have I got anything better to do? The blog where I never post? The tennis courts, on whose beautiful synthetic surface I set my feet upon once in 3 months? The magazine, for which I never submit quality stuff, and crib about too less people attending the meetings? Those long gossip sessions which usually start and end nowhere? The pursuit for attaining Sudoku nirvana? Oh, no. I AM a Ghissu, right?

Answer- NO.

Proof?





Fragster killed kik a** (Sorry for this, Kart. But I LOVED IT!!!) with a head-shot from m4a1.

Did I say there was this tech-fest called Cognizance coming up? An event called Chaos...

Winter Mornings

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP!



There goes off my early morning alarm at 6:30 a.m. The beeps ring in my ears seemingly perpetually. A hand, begging for mercy to stay in the warmth and coziness of that oh-so-nice blanket, reluctantly reaches out for that piece of digital madness which drives its beholder crazy every morning- and finds nothing but a badly placed glass and some other pieces of cutlery in its wake. Ah! Have I gotta get up and switch off that ruddy thing right now? As the temperature creeps up from its midnight nadir to a more acceptable 7.5 degrees (which I managed to catch from the corner of my half-ajar eye as I groped to switch that digiclock off), I stole a glance outside my window to see a foggy canteen alone, although the Met department says the visibility levels are pretty high for this time of the year. My groggy mind wonders whether to venture out of the cosiness of the blanket into the cold surroundings outside- the decision was pretty easy.



It's a Saturday today. No classes today but there's the dreaded NCC drill again. A new sem moved into its fifth day and NCC too made its comeback to every (so-called) cadet's grimace in the Bhawan (which is what our not-so-hospitable hostels are called). 8:30 a.m. My cellphone alarm now urges me to pull my lazy arse off that bed now (the digiclock has been drowsily put to rest below the table on which it fatefully rang two hours ago). A trip to the bathroom for a blind brush revealed everyone else in the corridor (contrary to my expectations) had succesfully fought off an urge to stay in the warmth of their blankets and get ready for another one of those long drills in the grounds. A bath is ignored (with disdain by most others) by me a little reluctantly- a daily bath seems to have become a luxury nowadays! I pull on that soily uniform on the same clothes I slept in (too lazy to take them off!) and walk to the mess for breakfast.



15 minutes, a (so-called) burger and a bitter apple later, I'm off (on a cycle with its owner on the pillion as no one would wanna give this overweight retard a lift themselves) to the grounds which (again, contrary to expectations) reveals around a 100 others ready for the drills (well, of course, although 350 are a reluctant part of NCC first-years).



10 minutes later, we're leaving for the hostel again (after uttering an army truck-load of abusives for the no-show of the usually on-time-and-demanding-of-the-same-from-lazy-kids officers), enjoying the winter chill, a view of that inconquerable fortress (the first-year girls' hostel) and a few wannabe Indian Idol voices along the way past the Saraswati Mandir (where a few offer their prayers) and the ABN grounds (where, already, a few schoolkids have started their daily dose of cricket). It's again a different story that we reached the drill grounds 15 minutes late but we still managed to show up, didn't we?



Back to the corridor, the other guys (who share a common penchant for not having a bath even when we have all the time in the world. Gosh, we haven't even got out of our uniform yet!) decide to begin a new game of tennis cricket (this country is so crazy about the sport, we Indians can make anything relate to cricket!), the last instalment of which had resulted in a badly fractured tubelight and quite a few lost tennis balls. I plainly refuse to join in (without being invited to play) and pull out my new Electromagnetics book to brush a few concepts I had missed out while on my regular mid-class trip to Les terres de sommeil. The catch- I couldn't bear the cold in my room so I walked into the sunlit lawns below. I had barely finished reading the name of the author and his university when faces started creeping in from all corners of all floors and questions and accusations flew in at 2.732N times the speed of saliva from a normal human being's mouth (N being Avogadro's number). "Oye! Aaj bhi padh raha hai? Tabiyat kharab hai kya?" (which literally translates from Hindi as"Hey! Studying today? Are you out of your mind?). A handful of seconds later, I was scurrying back to my room (not because of the shouts, but I was sick of repeatedly being asked to throw the ball back up to the pros playing tennis cricket in the corridor), and I reached the warmth and comfort of my blanket, but not before a few expletives and kicks to the behind by my dear comrades (who were decidedly angry with their "ball boy" resigning from his post). I sat in my room contemplating whether to touch that book again and go past the preface.

1:30 p.m. Back after a tiring but fun session of (you guessed it right!) tennis cricket (even I, the perennial cricket critic, couldn't escape its charm), I got ready to have that not-too-palatable lunch served in the mess (which stays true to its name). About the book? It sat on my table, gathering dust till the next time its new owner mustered the courage to pick it up again. And what was its owner doing?

HOWZZAT???
That was out, you idiot!
No, it wasn't!
Oh, you sore loser!
Loser, who?
!@#$%^&*.........

It was just another normal day. I love winter mornings.

A new beginning (isn't ANY beginning "new"?).

OK.

New things galore. The 503rd leap year, a new semester on, and, of course, a new blog for this blabberhead (who, invariably, is typing this in the library of all places possible- which probably explains his helplessness when it comes to academics).

New things galore, alright.

But, some things just don't change do they- a new semester begins with me caught dozing in the very first bench (yet again?) and this blog, too, begins with that oh-so-familiar aimlessness of mine which has characterised the 502nd, 501st, 500th and 499th leap years (and the other 365-day ones in between two) led by me.

So without further ado, I move on to the logical conclusion of this first post- MOVE ON TO THE SECOND! (Hah! I wonder if you really expected this, and I'm pretty sure that you're punching me in your mind in there- OUCH! THAT HURT!)

Happy blogging!

And dear reader, if you decide to navigate again to this very page (which, under normal circumstances, you WOULDN'T), you'd...hmmm.... let's just keep it under wraps for now (which is a nicer way of saying "I don't really know what I'm gonna post.").

Happy reading! (which logically translates to "Happy committing suicide!")