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Essays

The useless "S" word!!!

As i was tottering along the floor today, i reached the door of the washroom whose door, thanks to the awesomely random designs, opens inside. So a person standing in the washroom is bound to get a hit for just boasting to his mirror self on how handsome he really is. Anyway so today as i reached the door, a person came out and we just had a eye to eye contact. There was no collision nor even a touch involved. But the first thing i spoke was “Oh, I am sorry”. I was like dude, this is too much. Why do i have to blabber out this senseless “S” word first thing, irrespective of what the situation is?


Few worse situations do come in my mind. I have never been in the “outside washroom door opener” category. I always get hit. Now even if i do get hit, the first thing that comes out of my mouth is “Am sorry”. I always think why do i have to be so passive when it is me who is hurt. However it is not like i always am passive about the things when i speak the “S” word. Even are the situation when i go sorry with a tone of “you ba**ard”. May be i have developed a way to swear by not really swearing. You know that cute little silence maintained when someone is boasting about himself, just to convey “go to hell. am least interested.” I guess this is something on similar lines.


Moreover its not just about the “S” word. He has got an equally senseless stepbrother which goes something like “Thank you”, the “T” word. Now this too is used in a similar context free manner. I remember a time when i thanked a guy who actually was helped out by me from a critical situation.


These situation make me think, is there really any use of the words like sorry and thank you when they are used so freely without really giving a second thought on why am sorry about or what am thanking about. Leave aside the crap that it helps in conveying some feelings. Com’on, there are better ways to communicate the same feelings. After all words are not everything. An expression like below can surely make anyone forgive others. Silence is golden as they say. Rather i feel silence, bundled with perfect expression, speaks a thousand words!


An Experience

“Learning how to drive has been too easy these days my friend”, he said, “It’s a simple principle. Throw money learn honey. I learnt it not by choice, but by compulsion.” He had a sense of austerity in his voice. I knew i was about to embark on a journey of one of his lifetime experiences.

Though highly disinterested, flaunting my  phony curiosity i queried, “So when did you learn driving then.” I was more worried about me bumping the vehicle into the truck ahead.

“Long back,” going into a hazy flashback, he said. “The moment i knew school is not my liking and studies hardly interest me, my family started looking for some work for me. There was no concept of job actually. There was work which would earn money for the supper. Who best to earn it than a lone useless, dumb fellow in the house”

Frisking what i listened for a question to throw back, i asked him “So you were the eldest? The only bread earner in your family?”

With a sudden smirk on his face, he replied ” Actually i am the youngest among the siblings. I have 3 older brothers, all well educated and hold nice jobs. But soon they left the home. Ashamed may be of the illiteracy in the family.” I knew the reason was more a taunt to them than a reason.

“So what did you do then”, I asked him, my eyes glued to the traffic signal ahead approaching faster.

“I didn’t have to do anything actually. Those were the days when the transport business was calling out for unskilled labour as conductors. My father pushed me into one. The work was simple. Whatever the king of the truck, the driver ustaad would say, the conductor would do. Whatever was literally ‘whatever’, including washing vehicle, buying him a beer bottle, bidis, making him a peg, washing the beer glasses. Anything and everything which by social thoughts would sound as child torture.” I hoped he was not talking about sexual one though.

Being a bad listener to one’s saddest and ugliest of the experiences, i did not want to go in the details of the torture. I queried him further “So what about driving then?”

Aye bha*ve hat na baju” he sweared at a cycle rickshaw ahead. The rickshaw puller pedaled for another 100 meters before siding, least affected by the blasphemous outrage thrown at him. “These bloody idiots wont listen as long as you don’t use below-abdomen swears. Maa Behen pe na jao to palle nahi padta inke. My ustaad always used to tell me, best horn is that which is particularly customized for the one you are blowing at. Use your mouth in cities more than honking”. I decided not to listen to this teaching of his, not for now at least.

“Anyway about the driving, that was another role the conductor has to play when the driver was talli with beer. Suddenly one day he would pass the steering half crawling and say sambhal isko. It started with a prank, when ustaad had a good laugh along with his drunkard gang over my terrified face. I came to know after few months that actually that was the first step of my driving class under ustaad. That was my first experience of driving.”

Damn interested i asked, “So what next. Did he teach or just played rash on you?”  Cool and calm, he pointed at a tea corner and said, ” For now i am teaching you. Lets take a break. Lots of rash experiences did follow. The experiences that collated to form my driving sessions. Aaram se baithke sunte hain. Do kadak chai dena chotya. Special.

I awaited agog to listen to his series of driving sessions with his eccentric ustaad. I knew there were many experiences worth pondering over going to be unbundled soon.

At the other side, Chotya was cleaning the table in front of me. Suddenly he looked to me completely oblivious of the experience he was part of.

A lame effort ...

Another day goes by. Each day passes with me starting my day with a plan to blog about the zillions of ideas i have sidelined over the week now. I have to put a sticky post something on this guy’s face. This is a lame effort atleast to make that face a bit freshen.


So just to update, i am fed up with the monotony my life has been following. The following picture catches this phase of my life perfectly. I am facing the same soul deadening monotony.


soul-deadning-monotony


Anyways i have made my mind now. I am working on a story that i heard from a person who taught me a lot over the period of 3 days. It has to come out. I will do that. Soon.

'Fatty' Brain ...

Now that’s not just a random title that i chalked out. Actually it is a fact. I read today that a person’s brain is the most fatty organ in his body!


Surprised? Even i was. I mean common. How can a tummy, that can expand to store 4 liters of food i.e. 50 times its empty size, be less fatty than a brain? Even if it is fat, should i even care. I think no one is faintly concerned about some fat crawling over a body part which one does not ,or rather cannot, flaunt.


But as i snaked through the article further, i found one interesting fact. Thanks to that, i can now sleep as long as i want. It seems when a person sleeps, his brain gets busy to file away all the memories of the day. I can now disportingly say that “I am gyming my brain dude. Fats are crawling even in the blood vessels now and my brain does not want to die devoid of oxygen”. Put on a board saying “Fat brain at work” and rumble along the snoring dreams.


Fatty brain


Oh yeah. Even regarding dreams there are few interesting facts that the brain spins. Have you ever questioned yourself why you don’t actually act what you are dreaming? Or even simplest form saying what in fact are dreams? I do have. Though one thing i missed is a fact that 12% of the people dream in black and white. I just have one doubt here. What is the criteria that decides whether you will dream in 35mm technicolor or age old BnW? Whatever, its just another example of pointless statistics.


Moreover it seems your brain cheats you when you sleep by releasing some kind of hormone which actually paralyzes you. The sole intention is to make sure you don’t wake up next morning bawling about your aching bum which you hurt when you were horse riding in the dream. In short, it makes sure you don’t act your dreams. How i wish the brain was not so cruel on mankind. I mean, won’t it be good to actually go ahead and gym out your body too as the brain is getting fat burned. C’mon, it does afterall know the burden of carrying along the extra fat


Anyways, few more interesting facts are canned at the below link. Just go ahead and tickle your fatty brain


http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/sciencetech/facts-about-your-brain/7038

The modern face of armed robbery..

Just when i think not to trouble my mind, saturated by randomness to its full, i come across the little gems like this.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090123/od_nm/us_goat;_ylt=Ag7ntPE15g0Li3_NWwySSlgSH9EA


Apparently police in Nigeria detained a goat on the suspicion of attempting an armed robbery. Yes. You heard it right. Goat arming itself up with a shotgun and making the Vigilante men stare down the gun nozzle? All for a Mazda 323? I mean common. A Mazda 323 can only be as useful to a goat as a padded two’s to Pamela. If you neglect the lone possibility of she pooping on it. If it has been for “hay”, there was at least a chance of this happening.


That’s not it all. Actually there were a couple of them. Dude, coupling Hayek with Pamela still keep padded ones look useless. Moreover a couple of goats stealing a car? I know scientists are trying weird experiments on animals these days like cloning n all. But i never heard of such advanced experiment of churning out a species with body of goat and mind of Anton Chigurh. Not even on the fastest news reporting channel on this bloody earth, “Aajtak”. So if its not reported on Aajtak yet, its not possible even for 10 years now.


Although the main part is what might suit the tastes of few channels here. You see actually they were two guys who were trying to rob the car when the Vigilantes confronted them. One ran and other turned himself into the goat. Now the dangerous little goat is in custody and the police are waiting to prove it scientifically that it actually is possible to convert a person into a goat magically(!). Now i get it. So it was not the goat who was robbing armed, it was actually a man.


But now that it is crystal clear, i do not have even a single word to speak? First thing they actually do not shoot the white n black beast wearing so dangerous a throne of horn right at sighting it. Secondly they ask to prove that it is possible that an armed man can be converted into a goat? Common. The scientist have long discovered the dose to convert the buffalo-like-hardly-rising small dumb little ball of flesh into an ultra-active-hard-hitting beast. They call it an energy drink which does transform a sleepy crawling man into an awesome enthusiast you see. So calming down the beast to a goat look alike is just too easy a job. Just a bit of physical transformation is required that’s it.


So here i urge the related police staff to take a strict action against the goat and hang her till her death. The man that actually has transformed himself into goat is too dangerous for this world and so are his accessary. I heard they are working on something which can make this happen…


Why does darkness exist?

I have been gliding in the darkness for around 3 hours now, for one simple reason. The tube light in my room suddenly felt a strong desire not to glow. It went on blinking at me, i guess trying to figure out if i have worn any .. pajamas or not. I did try and rotate it around, with it never returning me a stare. While spending my precious time there, stroking the keyboard in darkness, a question just poked its head out of the ruffled mind. Why the heck is the darkness there.

bulb1

I mean, ok fine. I know why it is there. I do have scribbled through the endless questions on solar system and planets structure and their hecking orbits. But i am not concerned about its how it exists. Rather i want to know how useful is it. I just want to justify its existence with one hell of a random reason, the farther it is from the truth, better it is.

I feel everything that exists, does so for some random reason. Even the minutest thing like a microbe is there because it leads or conjoins together to form or shape something awesomely important like virus, lets say. Yes they are weighty in a sense to control the growth of the big parasites in the form of humans. Similarly something like air, whose presence cannot be seen, is there to blow the smelly farts away. The sole reason for such senselessly senseless arguments is to emphasize the point that, yes, each thing can be tagged with the reason for its existence.

But even the random mind of mine could not reasonify the existence of darkness. To develop films?? Nah, very few do that now and those who do it actually do it by pulling over darkness. We are focusing on the natural darkness that arises with night.  To sleep??? Nah, actually sleep has got more to do with the time than it has got to do with darkness.  What then?

I know i am acting a bit ignorant, by may be neglecting many scientific things. I actually want to because i want some reason out of my mutable mind. The only reason i can think of gives me goosebumps.

I feel the whole purpose of darkness is to hide the light. So darkness is not "non-existence of light". But actually it is the other way round. Light is "non-existence of darkness". Whenever there is something that nature wants to do without making humans aware, it pushes darkness in. So it must be doing something at each night. Intercourse? Quite possible.

An argument can be made saying people do put on the lights then. But actually you see, that's the reason they just blink sometimes rather than staring. And thats the reason am in dark today. Nature is at work. Reproducing :)

What really is ambition?

Today it happened again. A previous post has had many hits from the Google search. I know there is nothing surprising about this part. But what follows is.

The query type was usually like "My ambition in life" or "My ambition" or "What are my ambitions" or "My plans and ambitions". One query was also of the sort saying "Why have i lost my ambition". Instant reaction was like, ok, i know Google does answer your query. But i dearly wish it does not move to this personal level. I dearly wish a day would never come when i would google for "Where have i forgotten my underwear". I dearly wish i don't.

But after some time, I thought fare enough. Someone must have searched for an essay with this topic. Afterall even i remember how, during the 2nd -5th standard, my ambition changed with changing teachers and essay books. It mutated from a nation serving politician or soldier to a hard-working-son-of-soil farmer to a life saving doctor. Frankly speaking, considering the level of english i could blabber on my own, the essay that was not lengthy enough not to be mugged up, at the same time sounded good and earned marks had content for "My ambition". But i don't remember myself ever scribbling about being a "gibberish-speaking" sleepy bug dwelling in virtual reality, being a computer engineering, i.e., to be specific.

Anyways this fact urged me to think what really is an ambition. I thought of mining the precise definition for the word and to my surprise what it really means is "an ardent desire to achieve something". An ardent desire? That is it? Boss, i have been ceaselessly told my ambition has to foretell a long time down the future. All those "cheek-bursting" aunts and grandmas and uncles danced on my head for ages to know what i would be when i grow old, what is my ambition. I always doubted if they wanted to boggle the million rupees estate i would have. To such extent was my fear that i started publishing "social service" as my ambition just to push the demons away.

But now i feel pity that i was wandering along without really answering that question in the best way. If an ardent desire is what ambition is all about, then yes i would have had hundreds of ambitions. And the list has grown to a thousands now with passing age. With each ambition i achieved, i feel i have installed few more in the list. I know and still remember the whole gyan about a life lived without ambition is like an arrow fired without an aim. But then if i have to talk practically I feel it is highly impossible to lay the path for whole life right at the birth. Nah one can't.

And that does not mean as a child i spent my life without an aim. I still had an aim to complete my homework just to rush out to play hide n seek or help mom out with an aim to go out for a walk in some mela or finish every possible household exercises even on a foggy Sunday with an aim just to use that as an excuse while am watching a cricket match. Now i know these were my ambitions. Far more practical than being a politician or a doctor.

Yes i know there are still these whole lot of concepts of long term goal and short term goals and art of living and blah. So I feel skeptic to use ambition as a word. I feel i better call it a simple desire.  I have decided to pursue my billions of small but practical desires under the hood of long term, impractical or rather unverifiable ambition of being a respected and followed both professionally and personally. I have already mentioned how my ambitions faded away with time. I know my desires won't. I would be happy if the list grows to some tens of thousands, that would imply that i atleast completed 100 such desires. 100 such ambitionsi will call them.

A passage I long to live...

Just finished watching the most wondrous poem on love and life, "Before Sunrise". I am so damn impressed. Its pretty amazing how the author's, the director's view can change a dragging chitchatting of a "just-met" couple into such awesome a journey for the viewer too. I mean, even i kind of get surprised that i thoroughly enjoyed a normal passage of some hours of two-people's life, their passage from strangers to lovers.

before_sunrise_film

Everything about this movie left me impressed. The sweet time it takes to unfold itself, the locales of Vienna crawling beautifully behind the leads, the gentle music in the background. All these small little things just heaved my experience of what lied at the core, the subtle talks of the couple in lead. I relished everything the author was trying to say. It made me think, made me revisit my thoughts about many things. I mean not just about love, about life too. All it had to say about death, god etc. Small little gems like the one when the actress, Celine, talks about the old man who spent his whole life thinking about his career and his work. That was just a spectacularly well written scene.

And about love, well its better experienced in the movie itself. I am speechless, out of word to spell out my experience. Its not just for the one's in love, but also for the others to relish.  All those  pretty words, the moist  eyed stares, those mushy silences, the tender touches. Everything. The poem in particular written with so plain a word, milkshake, as its base. Man, spectacular is the word.

Yes, I want to wend one such passage before sunrise in my life, if possible in Vienna. And yes, if so beautiful is love crafted on the moving canvas, am sure i won't be alone feeling that way.

Why do I even try?

True. I try like hell not to listen to him. He goes on bumping my head. But i remain focused. He bribes me with what i like. He threatens me to run away and never return. I try not to fall for his tactics. But finally i do. I pretend i will shoo him away, but that's the whole problem. I pretend...

Just a scenario, perfectly captured by Dilbert:

Dilbert.com

Anyways this bloody culprit in Internet just doesn't allow me to work my plans. I plan not to plan any plan, so that i don't feel bad when this plan of not to plan goes helter-skelter, unplanned. Thanks a lot internet.

Let me explain a bit. I reach home with a plan to read my novel, just to find the internet 'psst'ing at me. Calls me out to check my mails, read some scraps, check out some news on tech n all. And everyday i do fall for something or the other. I unknowingly, or that's what i pretend, plug the cable on and surf through the net.

Actually i did well in between to overcome this weakness of mine. I never fell for anything of sorts. But again somehow he has caught another of my nerve. He actually works stepwise now. Makes me switch on the powerplug spike for charging my mobile. He knows i am pretending to be just charging the mobile and i will turn on the laptop next. And everytime he turns out to be right. I pretend to turn the laptop on just for a bit to work something out and shut it down. But he knows that is not going to happen. Once the laptop starts he reminds me of something i need to do on net. I again pretend not to be surfing the net but just using it for a moment. But in fact, thats what i turn out to be doing. Surfing the internet.

Sometimes i ask myself why do i even try. I know i am failing to boggle my mind away from this culprit. But somehow i think this is that cunning but wonderous buddy with whom you can neither subsist nor part. Yes, that's what he is. Cunning, but wonderous.

Dawn of a new Era...

Finally i have managed to stablize the “new entity” i was working on for quite a long time now. Today it comes out of the testing phase and open out. I have been working on a “blogsite” trying to design and fill it up with contents. And finally it is up… And here is the first look.

The site can be accessed here. Please do visit and provide the feedback.

PS: I plan not to depart from here. I will surely be blogging here sometimes. Have some fond memories with this buddy too. But still the activity will surely be reduced.