Ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings

Whoever came up with the quote: “Sticks and stones may break my bones…” had never had my set of friends. Brutal honesty, expressed with an absolute finality of a coroner: “Your blog is dead!”, is sufficient reason to post soon. With the stench of mid-sems hanging in the air like some imminent doom, I believe this is what Coelho had in mind when he writes in ‘The Alchemist’: “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it…” – Just the perfect excuse for sitting in front of the lappy and staring away at the screen as blank as your mind.

It’s a rough crowd out there in the campus these days – students going berserk, profs going on strike. Even my otherwise hibernating neighbour was driven by a fiendish zeal, meticulously masterminding and executing his devilish plans. Aah! The evils of poli. The admin as usual remains clueless. Ignorance is sheer Bliss. When fights erupt between two rival poli groups, they shut down all canteens. I mean what do they think this is, some medieval-age castle warfare? Cut off their resources, choke all their escapes… With no rations, they are bound to give in sooner or later.

The only time I felt genuinely proud of the IIT-R faculty was when I came across an article in ‘Business Standard’ explicitly mentioning the Roorkee crowd opting for an additional four day leave as a protest against the insufficient pay hike. The happiness as such, was short lived. Not only was the strike called off, they even graciously accepted to keep Saturday a working day (How in the world did it help their cause?). In the midst of all this the students were conveniently forgotten. Couple this to the frenzy surrounding poli and SAC posts, and the humour is ironical.

———

Of late, I have acquired some unhealthy habits like going off to the library when the exams appear uncomfortably close. Not that they have really helped me a lot; except maybe raise my CG a couple of digits on the wrong side of the decimal. Yet there is hope. My blog survives….

:P hantasmagoria

Mind does weird things. And contrary to popular belief , I too am gifted with one. Moreover, it is functional, albeit in all sorts of crazy manner. It might be just as primitive as that of a  Neanderthal or heck! even a chimp for all I care, yet the kind of things it can come up with are real beauties! The most fascinating of them all is the arbit dreams I keep having, sometimes with certain thoughts connecting so elegantly, they leave me surprised and often with answers to some of the many turmoil raging through my mind. While at other times, it is just what it is – a bizarre dream.

During one of my late morning slumbers, which had been quite frequent of late, owing to the grilling badminton coaching sessions that saw me waking up at all ungodly hours, I had this fantastic dream – a melange of luck and adventure with an amazing comic timing. As is with most such fantasies, I now remember only bits and pieces of the thrilling escapade:

I, along with a couple of my friends were riding in a delivery van over a bridge. Along came a lion, running abreast our modest transport. Now this was all just a dream, nevertheless a lion sprinting along one’s van sure feels out of place anywhere on earth! Anyway, as luck would have it, the engine started sputtering soon like an asthmatic patient (it too got shit-scared like us probably!) and died somewhere in the middle of the bridge. The icing on the cake was the missing part of a better half of that bridge. I don’t know why that worried me – I couldn’t have hoped to outrun the lion anyway. Before long, we were standing on the edge of the jagged ends of the incomplete bridge looking down, way down, into what felt like sure death – a vast… ocean! This was kind of unnerving considering that bridges across rivers and canals were more heard of and would have been more helpful eventually. Still, it’s my dream – I can dream a canal, a river or a Milky Way; and we are not arguing over the possibilities of that happening. Given the gravity of the situation, we arrived at the decision of jumping off the edge almost instantly. Probably, the prospect of finishing off our lives with a huge leap of faith was far appealing than getting mauled and mutilated to death by that lion.

There was an obscenely long interval between the moment my feet left the terra-firma and the splash! The racing of thoughts were like the flickering of the celluloid frames of the days of yore – erratic, blurry and yet revealing. Oddly enough I found another set of my friends airborne – a squealing assortment hitched to a Para-sail. With a flurry of frantic gestures and incomprehensible screaming, they tried to encourage me to grab the sail, not a very easy task considering that they were metres away from me and I was falling down faster than a lump of lead. The ocean surface was rising up to meet me at a mind-numbing speed, and I waited for that sickening crunch against the impenetrable wall. There was no panic; just an acceptance of my bleak chances of making it alive through this. It was peaceful – survival seemed inconsequential – though somewhere in my heart I still wished for it more than death. Amidst those numerous heartbeats of black-outs, all that remained was a wonder of how this all might end… Splash!

I hit the water surface and was consumed in the raging torrent of air and liquid. A mild panic struck me – what if I never make it to the surface! – an experience that has always stuck with me, undiminished through all the many occasions I had of diving in pools. Time elapsed… seconds, minutes, an eternity. When my head did break through the surface, the breath came in huge gasps. I caught a glimpse of the Para-sail and my friends breaking loose from the floating canvas, before I was swallowed back into the ocean that treated me with all the gentleness of a tempest. Desperately I swam across, to the group huddled together, caught by intermittent fear of the creatures that might be roaming the abyss beneath me. I reached them unscathed, and so did the rest of my mates who had jumped off the bridge. Later, I found us all drying ourselves in a dark recess partly filled by foaming water. As the excitement of the adventure subsided to make way for the sobriety that often follows the high adrenaline rush of such life endangering ventures, our senseless chatter evolved into a reasonable discussion – “What next?”. As soon as the matter of funds available with each one of us was brought up, I found money (which I don’t recall keeping) in the apparently water-proof pocket of the swimming trunk (that I don’t remember having worn in the van); the kind of pleasant surprises that are exclusive to the realm of dreams alone. Perhaps, satisfied with the way the things were turning out and with the surety of our return to the civilization, I broke out of my nap.

Moral of the Story: All’s well that ends well!

Life beyond Grades

Roorkee summer and the endsems – it doesn’t get any better than this! I am either sweating under the blazing sun or after a glimpse at the course syllabi. The room offers no respite from the heat either, and soon lecture halls and library seem so much more inviting for all the wrong reasons. Trudging along the dreary road back to Azad one such day, I find a rick-puller under the shade of a tree, swiping off the sweat from his face. Remnants of his youth still lingered there somewhere, but flecks of white peppered across his head were in stark contrast – a witness to the grim struggle that was his life. I wonder, for the rest of my way back, about life – with all its unfairness and ironies, and despair and regrets; and yet the innate sense of hope within it and the joy of living. I wonder what secrets my future conceals….

Tempting fate

I have no clue how they work – the Almighty and his Providence! No matter how hard I try to reassure myself about all the “I make my own destiny” crap, I grudgingly admit that at certain times all you can do about a situation is sit back and watch it unfold, helplessly. And when things do go wrong, as they will, all one can do is wring one’s hand (or others’ necks!) and curse their misfortune.

All my elaborate plans and dreams have just wasted away, leaving behind a sour taste in my mouth and a scowl on my face. And leaving others still, susceptible to my venom-laced sputtering. I had tried, all this while, to keep my expectations to a bare minimum. I was cautious against raising my anticipations too high, too soon. But hope, like those glowing embers of fire, have a way of rekindling into flames with even a hint of a gust.

As ever, in spite of everything, a thought had lingered somewhere – in the deep recesses of my mind – foreboding me: It was all too good to be true. And now that premonition has come true. Life is back to the dreary old routine – so predictable. No more plannings, no nervous uncertainities. I have nothing more to look out for….

Nitwit!

A lot many things come easier to me than posting on my blog as frequently as thrice a month. Nevertheless, finding one’s blog in the dark, forgotten abyss of others’ blogroll is not in the least comforting. Out of the desperation to post something… anything, and the inability to come up with anything decent, I have resorted to relating an incident – compromising my hard-earned reputation for the sake of some comments.

April Fool’s Day is quite over-rated. I mean, why would somebody bother to play pranks on the day when it’s most obvious? Well… unless you do it with panache. And here’s an instance of how it’s done (Don’t forget to check out the comments!). Not everybody, though, needs an exclusive day to make an oaf out of people. Now I’m no street-rat from Agrabah; I, nevertheless, am adequately endowed with street-smartness. Or so I liked to believe, until that fateful day….

One fine morning I alighted from the bus right at Atta, the heart of Noida. Completely preoccupied with crossing the road, I soon found myself amidst three ascetics. They certainly didn’t make for a very attractive sight, with their dread-locks and retro-looks. The  snakes wrapped around their forearm weren’t making them appear any less terrifying either. So, it was natural that I forgot all my courtesies and tried to keep as much distance as possible from those seemingly dead serpents. The ‘ascetics’ on the other hand felt it their obligation to bless me, and so it came to pass that I was found cornered against the barricades near the Delhi Metro construction site, fighting (pleading would have been more like it) my way out.

Their initial attempts to squeeze money out of me, met a formidable opposition. I cleverly fished into the deep recesses of my pocket to draw out some meager change. Unfortunately, a five rupee coin was the least I had (talk about getting lucky!). Quickly handing it over to those ’sages’, I attempted to flee. The fate, it seems, had other plans! They asked me to draw out some ‘big bucks’. The leader of the pack vehemently swore by the names of a dozen deities that he had no intention of keeping that money. I, ofcourse, wasn’t going to be taken in that easily. Though, the philanthropist in me, well…. It would suffice to say that my hands withdrew my wallet and voila! There I was holding out a crispy hundred.  The Alpha-male apparently fell in love with my money because soon he asked for another hundred. Now I was definitely not going to give him that, especially after the way he had snatched the previous note! So it came as a surprise to me when I offered him another hundred (More reluctantly than the last time though). After all, from what he told me, he just wanted to pair the two hundred rupee notes – such noble intentions, by the looks of it! I guess, that really got them interested in me, beacause he began  inquiring about my ambitions. However lame it sounded, I managed to blurt out all the info he was seeking. Incidentally, His Holiness had been gifted with amazing sight in addition to his unconventional looks and exceptional eloquence. The five hundred lying inconspicuously in my wallet could not remain hidden for long. Needless to say, that soon passed into his hands, too. After asking me to repeat after him certain dumb lines, he touched the money to the snake’s mouth and poof! the seven hundred just vanished.

If you have watched cartoons, you may be familiar with those instances when a character realizes that he has been tricked. He has this pitiable expression of the revelation that struck him, and a thought bubble that has a jackass labelled ‘JACKASS’. Well, that is exactly how I was feeling. The jerk then handed me a rudraksh, which I suspect was just as fake as them and assured me that all my troubles are going to be consumed by that snake (just like it ate all my friggin’ money – a huge appetite, i might add!). All my threats and pleads were useless. As I withdrew from the scene, a wise rick-puller decided to fill me in with his tid-bits. I was enlightened to the fact that those rascals had duped a guy of one whole grand a while ago (So, I wasn’t alone!) and that he had to approach a nearby cop to recover the sum. Now, only the heavens above know, whether it was the mention of the cops or a delayed effect of my pleadings, but the guy heading the pack returned my five hundred rupee note. That infused me with a fresh desire to retrieve what was rightfully mine! As I insisted for the remaining balance, the guy just hushed me and started nibbling at the snake’s skin. That freaked me out so much that all of a sudden the two hundred began appearing insignificant. And so, parted our ways. End of story.

PS: My first P.S. for my blog. (sob!sob!)

PPS: (No, I’m not gonna write anything like: ‘My first P.P.S. …’) Please try and empathize with my situation before commenting – I was just too restless to get out of the situation. I was taken by surprise and outnumbered! Odds were against me!…

Never an absolution

Compared to any ordinary mortal, I have always found myself to be relatively free during such days as these – bearing threats of an approaching midsem or endsem. Unlike the afore mentioned lesser humans, scuttling around in a state of hysteria, I can be found in my room doing… ummm… nothing! This apparent disposition of calmness which people may mistakenly attribute to my superior preparations, is more of a stupor, owing to the lack of the same. It is the hopelessness of the whole predicament and the acceptance of the inevitable doom that renders me worthless.

Interestingly, this uselessness gives rise to an ardent desire within me to immerse myself into all sorts of new ventures, just as long as they aren’t even remotely linked to my acads. First, it was the Rubik’s cube that caught my fancy, and hence ensued an unsuccessful attempt of learning to solve it; next followed an addictive spell of DoTA. Unfortunately, these whims of mine, rise and ebb with the tides of time - that are the examination season. Conforming with the traditions, this time around, it is gonna be my blog and my neighbor, The Sage’s guitar (which, incidentally, has been taken on lease from a particular inmate of SB; and conveniently forgotten by both the lender and the borrower – to my delight, I may add!).

Sporadically scattered across such suspended states of my existence are moments of panic which find me with a textbook – in a feeble attempt to justify my presence in the insti. More often than not, such a delusioned state soon culminates into another one with me daydreaming or better still, dozing off – the whole nine yards! Consistent through all of this is a thought gnawing at my mind – slowly, persistently – consuming, within me, any desire to savor that moment. It is the acceptance of my need to study combined with the realization that everyone else is doing it; and my innate disability to follow suit.

———

Piercing through the lulling melody of  the LOTR soundtrack, comes hurtling a string of curses and expletives of most ingenious kinds! Left in its wake, are the shattered remnants of a deathly silence that only moments ago haunted the narrow corridors. Someone just failed to make or break a new ‘Minesweeper’ record!  People stir – rudely awoken from their reverie. And a smug grin spreads across my face as I get back to finishing off this post. The world is so much more marvelous, if only you aren’t alone! The future lies safe still, with those of us who will defy all odds (and commmonsense!) and follow their hearts. Not everything is lost… yet!

And so it begins…

It was inevitable! What with half of the people around you having a blog of their own, and the other half harboring similar expectations from you.

It is especially difficult these days to get a URL of your choice. All the excitement of starting on a new endeavor is soon extinguished with an irritatingly iterative: “Sorry, that username already exists!”, displayed on the screen. Owing to this and the evident lack of imagination, I found it easier to venture into the unfamiliar territory of foreign languages.

‘Mes Caprices’ is french for: ‘my whims’, or atleast, that is what the Google translator tells me! I love french as a language, just as I love french wine and french beauties – in spite of the fact that I have had nothing to do with any of them whatsoever! It is suave. To quote the Frenchman ‘Merovingian’ from the movie ‘The Matrix Reloaded’ – “I have sampled every language – french is my favorite – fantastic language, especially to curse with… Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperies de connards d’enculés de ta mère… You see, it’s like wiping your ar*e with silk, I love it!”: leaves little to imagination! That, i guess, sums up my reasons for choosing french over the rest.

As for the blog; I keep getting into a fix a tad bit too frequently to fall short of contents to post. There is no paucity of time either. It is the streaming of one’s thoughts into a singular, mellifluous flow that requires the most effort… and God! I am gonna need all the patience of a dead man to achieve such humongous tasks!

Here’s hoping for some such miserable moments, when I find nothing better to do than to pour my arbit thoughts out to the world!

Au revoir!