Local Train

He woke up at around 1 am.

He brushed his teeth, shaved and got into his usual jeans and T-Shirt. Wrote a letter.

He walked out of his housing society, hailed an auto to Goregaon East station.

He sat down on the platform and waited.

As the train entered the station, he lied down on the tracks.

The fucking train stopped just before it reached him.

He took an auto to get back to work, hoping no one saw him. Threw the letter out on the way.

In The Line of Beauty

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

Now isn't that about one of the most intelligent statements to come across. It's by Jiddu Krishnamurti, who or whose teachings I confess I have very little personal knowledge of. I have always stayed away from such people with large following because I have a simple logic - if a lot of people are following someone with so much devotion and faith, the person can't be worth following.

So, this line of beauty came to me through a friend, who told me this after a discussion through email on my usual frustration with people and life in general.

Maybe I should read more of Krishnamurti.

And, have I said this before? My friends are amazing. How did a person as asocial as me end up with a bunch of friends this mature, and this good.

Of beautiful magazines and ugly people

I should probably create a label called 'magazines' now.

Continuing my love for Lounge a bit further, I loved this week's edition of the magazine. Firstly, it had some nice articles about gaming, of both the online and the board type, by Krish Raghav, whom I ran into at IIT Kanpur recently. The meeting inspired me to read up on European board games like The Settlers of Catan, and a whole new fantastic world opened up for me. It's been a Narnia moment for me, the one where you open a door and discover a whole new unexplored world that you didn't even know existed.

I also liked the article by Aakar Patel. He must be the man whose articles generate the most hate mails for Lounge. He seems to enjoy doing something that I can't describe in English - 'ungli karna', and there can't be a better phrase for it (I think). He loves bursting the bubbles that we Indians of the present time seem to live in and it's always great to find someone who shares my lack of faith in the 'India story'.

There's a lot going great for our country. But Indians are also the most uncultured, crass group of people I can think of. And Patel captures it phenomenally well. Great credit to Lounge for keeping him a part of its even otherwise great portfolio of columnists, including the Mint editor who writes about graphic novels.

The article by Patel this week was about how we Indians are not city builders. In fact, we bring our cities criminally down, including the great ones like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. The name changes are not the worst of it.

This lack of civic sense continues into our daily lives too. I was reading the article after my trip to the local mall. People waiting right in front of the elevator door, breaking queues, not letting the people inside to get out, as if it were a vertical motion version of our Mumbai's local trains. A woman just walking away casually after her child took out several DVDs from the shelf and threw them on the ground at the Crossword store without bothering to place them back or even apologizing to the staff. Just two instances of how uncouth we are.

And the daily assault on my senses as people spit casually and honk madly on the roads is agonizing. I am increasingly beginning to hate being an Indian, or at least appreciate the merits of living within perpetually air-conditioned environs, where one does not have to encounter the real India.

This is a feeling similar to what I have had in relation to Bihar for a long time. I love the state, and feel very comfortable when I am in Bihar (even though I haven't been there since 2004), and it is an integral part of me. But, I can't identify with a lot of the typical cultural elements of the state. I can see what is wrong with the state, even though most of my fellow Biharis can't seem to, and they even revel in perpetuating these problems.

The same is happening with India on a larger scale now. We might be one of the fastest developing economies, but our mindsets are not developing at even a quarter of that rate. We might be the largest democracy, but we are unimaginably inconsiderate of other people's opinions. We might be the land that gave birth to non-violent protest, but we are easily one of the most violent people, looking forward to getting offended for the smallest of things.

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As might be clear by now, I am a sucker for great magazines. Am reading this other fantastic entrant into my pantheon. Forbes India has recently come out with their quarterly called Forbes Life India. It must be the most beautiful thing I have held in my hands in the last few months (without any sexual connotations). And the articles match up to the layout. I had been seeing it at bookstores for some time, but the (sterile) cover did not appeal to me at all (even though it has a naked person's picture). Then while waiting for the movie today (I saw Tanu weds Manu, which is really really good), I decided to spend some time at the Crossword store at the mall, flipped a few pages and fell in love. Really looking forward to seeing how the Network 18 guys follow up this class act.

More meat in Brunch now

No one does weeklies quite like the good fellows at HT Media. I have been a big fan of HT's weekend supplement Brunch and Mint's weekend supplement Lounge for a long time.

In fact, I had begun subscribing to HT on moving to Mumbai only because of Brunch, but then discontinued it because it felt wasteful as I wasn't reading the main paper at all. The column in Brunch I used to look forward to reading the most was Rude Food or its derivative columns by Vir Sanghvi. I get to read that now anyway through the link to the online version he shares every Sunday on his twitter account.

I still do read Mint, which in itself is a brilliant newspaper, and so Lounge finds itself placed on my doormat every Saturday morning, all smiling for me when I open the front-door almost the first thing after waking up.

I was in Kanpur this weekend to conduct a sci-fi quiz at IIT as part of their tech-fest TechKriti, and had resigned myself to the fact that someone would have removed my newspaper by the time I got back Sunday afternoon. And was immensely relieved on reaching my flat and finding that it was still there. There are few things more relaxing than retiring on your couch on a leisurely Sunday afternoon, after a few very hectic days, after a hot shower, with, yes, you guessed it, a mug of chilled Kingfisher beside you.

There was a short trip to Hypercity to do the grocery shopping between that return from Kanpur and retiring on the couch bits. One of the reasons I look forward to going to Hypercity every weekend is the shelves of magazines that greet you on entry into the store. I normally buy the latest edition of Tehelka, which I need to write about some time soon, and a couple of other magazines if anything else looks interesting. It usually doesn't.

But this time around a familiar name stood out from all the other India Todays and Newsweeks and Peoples on the shelves. I was surprised to see a thick edition of Brunch being sold there. Turns out the Brunch team has decided to come out with a glossier and meatier version of Brunch as a quarterly.

The inaugural edition has Karan Johar and Katrina Kaif on the cover, in case you plan to go out looking for it.

I haven't got beyond the first few pages, but the remaining content does look promising. I was slightly disappointed with the printing in the part that I have gone through - there are several words where the letters have been printed one on the other. But, hopefully just teething issues.

Life

I got to know a few days back that a girl I knew in my engineering college days died recently. She took her own life. I didn't know her too well. But, I knew her.

In my final final year in Delhi, I had too much time on my hands, and I had joined an NGO that worked towards creating awareness about suicide. My job there was to talk to people who contacted the NGO for help. These people were on the verge of killing themselves, but had enough will to hold on to something.

That girl I knew, and had spoken to a few times, lost that will sometime last week.

She was a very good student. Belonged to a not so well-to-do family. Parents wanted to marry her off. I felt she preferred being with women. Her marriage was fixed. I got to speak with her 4-5 times in February-March 2006. She had got married a few months after I left Delhi. She wanted badly to escape. She finally did.

I had contacted that NGO because I needed to get some sanity in my own life. After the craziness that my last couple of years in Delhi involved, I had given up a lot of hope. Just talking to people there helped a lot. I am a fair bit suicidal myself, but I have never gone to the limit of actually getting close to dying. A few cuts, a few rat-poison induced nose bleeds are mostly enough to give me enough of a scare. But, when I felt I was going beyond these relatively harmless limits, I sought help. I recovered, thanks in no small measure to some very important friends. It was suggested that, having been through those killer times, I should talk to others in similar situations. It was very cathartic, and probably helped some other people too, in that they found someone who was not judgmental.

During those painful years, what I realized was that the worst thing you can do to a person contemplating suicide is to tell him that suicide is for cowards. It really does not help. Very often, a person thinking of taking his own life is at the absolute bottom of self-worth. Telling him that the one resolution he can think of will only make him appear even worse cannot be of help. It might appear like an attempt at simplifying something that is really a lot more complex, but just listening is a lot more helpful.

A person inherently does not want to die. It is difficult to imagine how caged one must feel to take that step. Most people also do think of what effect it might have on their loved ones - their parents, friends, everyone who came to know them. To ignore all of this, to ignore all the pain, to just give up not being there tomorrow in the scheme of things - it's not an easy decision. It is taken only when multiple calls for help are not heeded. It is taken only when everything else seems pointless.

During my association with the NGO a school girl had jumped to death from her 5th floor flat because she thought she had not done well in her Boards. I had spoken to her two days before she died. It is not a great thing knowing that there might have been a chance I could have convinced her to live.

It is still not a great thing four years down. I am sorry Sakshi.

Bird Brained

An interesting thing happened over the weekend.

After the badly ventilated flat I had in Bangalore, I am fortunate enough to have one with two balconies in Mumbai now. It's awesome for the air as well as the light in the flat, and I don't need to switch on any lights till sunset.

The downside of these balconies is that I almost always end up being woken up in the morning by some pigeon's guttural sounds. And those idiots shit a lot too.

QI tells me that pigeons are the only birds that can suck. And they do suck a lot.

So, I have an AC carton kept in my living room balcony, which a pigeon couple had decided to convert into their own penthouse, despite all my acts of discouragement.

On returning from my Bangkok trip, I saw two eggs in the carton. Pigeon eggs are really small. So, I had let them stay for a while as I thought they'd be done with it soon. One of the eggs hatched sometime back.

Yesterday, I got angry with a friend and didn't have anything to vent my anger out on. So, I went and shook the carton really hard. The mom (I am assuming it was a 'mom' because she was sitting on the little pigeon chick thing) flew away in fright, leaving the kid behind. I shook some more and the chick bounced around for a while and fell down to the floor.

That was yesterday.

From last evening till the afternoon today, the stupid kid had shat all over my balcony, while the parents looked on perched on my AC. The maid hadn't come today so it was going to get even worse by tomorrow morning.

So, when the pigeons left for a while I lifted the kid on a magazine and threw it onto the roof of a car parked below my balcony. Was curious to see how the pigeons would react when they came back.

The pigeons came back in a few minutes and took some time in locating the kid. The morons then went on to nudge the kid off the roof on to the ground.

A dog came within moments and made a nice evening snack of the kid.

I threw the other egg down for the dog's dessert. But a crow flew in and ate it the moment it fell on to the ground.

This will teach the pigeons not to treat my balcony as prime real estate.

The Wall-E*

Spending Diwali away from home sucks. I have spent a good number of Diwalis in the last 10 years away from home, at various hostels, doing pretty much nothing. But this one sucks more, because I don't have the general hostel crowd around as well. And I know that this time, for a change, I could afford to go home despite the distance, and time did not permit. But I'll survive.

Was woken up around 6:30 am today. I had known since I was a kid, thanks to a Tam friend in school, that Diwali celebrations begin in the morning in South India, with oil baths, ganga-snanam and such stuff. I also knew that bursting crackers starts along with that right from the morning too. But it turns out that not only are crackers burst in the morning, there's apparently some sort of competition among kids to see which home starts doing it the earliest. My landlord's kids won hands down this time.

But, surprisingly enough, I did not wake up cursing them or at least irritated as I would have in most cases. I was standing in my balcony a while back, watching them play, and their happiness was infectious. Reminded me of the time, ages ago, when bursting crackers used to be fun and not fretting over how I am literally burning money and creating pollution along with it. I am growing really old now.

But, all said and done, I think it's a bit of a waste, or even more of a waste than it normally is, bursting crackers during the day. Crackers are fun because of the light and sound, but this way one just gets to 'enjoy' the sound.

And also, the idiot that I am, the absolute glee with which these small kids in my lane were playing with scary looking crackers made me think of this - we probably train kids in India too well to handle things that go boom. No wonder so many of them start playing with bigger versions when they grow old. We deserve our crackers. And our RDX.

* This usage is a friend's idea, and is stolen from his GTalk status. So often, for me, thinking up the title of a post takes about the same time as writing the whole post. Couldn't think of anything else for this one.

Just in

Was about to leave office when saw this at the Rediff page. I don't know if I missed any news on this earlier, but it's a great development. Open to misuse at times, but mostly a good thing.

The renowned Rediff message board is on full throttle with discussion already.

The 24-hour Picture Show

There are so many things that come to mind everyday, which I could write about, but by the time I get to my comp at home or at work, I forget, or find some more important work, or feel plain lazy.

It's like these ideas I keep having, one almost every day, very often in my dreams while sleeping, to base my bestseller on, but keep postponing every single day. At times I have even woken up at night to note down the idea that came to me while sleeping, but all pointless finally.

I have been thinking about writing about the various interesting scenes we come across in our daily lives that are worth capturing in a camera, but we don't. Or at least I don't. Partly because of this painful thing called laziness. Partly because these moments are too fleeting, and even if you did bother to focus a camera the moment would be past. But mainly because, I don't have a camera in my phone, and I can't carry my digicam, which anyway hasn't been charged in over a year, all the time.

I had phones with cameras for over two years, and had put them to occasional good use at times, but now the phone I am using doesn't have a camera. My office had given me a Blackberry Pearl, which did have a camera, but I managed to lose it within a week. Well, it got stolen, but the end result is the same. I was afraid that I would be asked to pay for it, or at least buy a Blackberry on my own, but they gave me an old one instead. I am hardly in a position to ask them for a better one now, and it's working well enough so don't need to buy one on my own either. Anyway, for a technologically challenged person like me, getting one phone configured to my Outlook account and getting other settings done was enough work for a lifetime. I am buying another phone like this only after I get a secretary.

Anyway, so coming back to my post, after that long digression, one of the most striking scenes I missed clicking a shot of took place about four years back on a cold Delhi morning. I had spent a night with a friend of mine at the boys' hostel of Ramjas College in DU North Campus and were coming back to Hauz Khas around 8-9am. We got slightly lost on our way to the metro station and ended up somewhere in the slums near Kashmere Gate. So there we were standing lost in front of a shanty, with a couple of kids answering calls (of the non-cell phone kind) in front of us, and a few metres behind them, at some height, there was this futuristic train rushing by. Cliched representation, but very very striking.

There are far too many such moments when I feel I could capture what I am seeing, and the way I am seeing it, for other people. Maybe even a blog is a non-pictorial attempt towards that same aim. Sometimes what I am seeing and find striking might appear very normal and mundane to anyone else.

For instance, the thing that inspired this post was a very innocuous incident. I walk for about 400m after getting down from the auto on my way back home from office. There's a very shady bar on the way (and my choosing to walk has got nothing to do with its being there), and a small shop that sells something to eat on the other side of the road from it. I haven't figured out, in two months, what it sells, but from the very strong smell and the number of dogs hovering about I can guess that it's some fried non-veg thing. Maybe some weird variety of fried chicken. Anyway, normally the people hanging around the shop to buy a plate of that weird fried chicken thing are men who have just come out of the bar or are going in to buy a bottle or two and move on. The other night I saw an old lady with a young girl and a slightly older boy there. The boy was quite fat, was sitting on the backseat of a parked scooter and the old lady, possibly a grandmom or something, was feeding him piece after piece of whatever she had just bought from there. It was very funny but endearing at the same time. And no, the girl wasn't being made to stare longingly while the boy, presumably her brother, hogged. She was eating as well, but not with the same speed.

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On an unconnected note, I do read all comments made here. Even at posts made months back. I just don't reply all the time, because I don't see a point in replying with a dumb comment or a smiley just to show that I am interested. It's not that I am not, but not enough to insult intelligence, yours or mine. At the same time, just as a clarification, I don't judge comments on whether they are intelligent or profound. Fire away with whatever you feel like.

Gets me everytime!

Oh blobit of dribble
Oozing from the upturned corner of my mouth
You look to me,
Like you should be,
The thing that dropeth from the cloud
A tiny bit of thee is stuck upon my lip
A little more is stuck up my nose
Some has adhered to my hip
My eyes are open and glassy
My snot is thick and green
And from my ears,
Something obscene appears,
And I think it might be me.
                     ------  Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz

Just felt like treating my regular visitor(s) to some exquisite poetry.

Festember

Just returned from a college fest at Bhubaneshwar and am about to crash (it's 6:30 am here), but decided to mention it here lest laziness takes over me again (the reason why I haven't been writing about a whole lot of other stuff I keep thinking about).

Even though 11 men lost to the sole lady in the fray for Rs 60K prize money and a week's stay in Singapore, this was definitely one of the most enjoyable weekends of my life. And hectic. Met some nice people along with that. And did extremely well, belying my faith in my abilities, in a few of the sub-events. Which bodes well for the upcoming competitions.

And, of course, the cash flows remained positive. We did well enough in the quizzes to make the defeat in the bigger event palatable. Quizzing hasn't been this much fun (and this profitable) for me ever before.

"Dil ko bana de jo patang saasein yeh teri woh hawaayein hain..."

What a line man! Most of the new Hindi film music that has come out lately has been a disappointment. The rest of Om Shanti Om is pretty average. Which is still better than the music for Laaga Chunari Mein Daag, from which I had high hopes. Saawariya, another film I expected to live up to Bhansali's past in terms of music, has failed so far. Though I have listened to it only once.

*************************************************************

So India won the 'World Cup'. This is probably the first time I felt nothing at all on a big Indian victory. I couldn't care less if India lost. It's either because I still think of 20-20 as an illegitimate form of the game, not that I retain much interest in the game itself anymore, or because my entire contact with the tournament was through Rediff's score page. Another of my asocial characteristics - I hate watching a match in a hostel TV room, with all sorts of idiots passing expert comments and clapping at every stupid instance. A lot of my friends enjoy it for precisely the same reasons.

One of the things I look forward to when I start earning is to watch matches on my own TV, sitting on my own couch, in my own house, with just a few friends. And yes of course, with beer and pizza.

A good thing about this particular victory is that I won't have difficulty ever in my life in recalling the exact date India won the first 20-20 World Cup.

Yet Another Quiz

For all practical purposes, my MBA is supposed to be over, even though I am doing more worthwhile courses this term than I have in the last four. But still, the sudden availability of time on my hands, coupled with most of the people I can bear talking to leaving the campus on exchange, has left me with too few choices to engage myself completely. I am finally trying to finish off the IMDb 250, or getting as close to it as I can, before work gets to me.

One great thing about this endeavor is that I have seen some amazing movies in the last week or so. Will make posts about them later. Or maybe not.

There are so many blogs on the net, and so few worth reading. I probably wouldn't be reading my blog if it wasn't mine. There's this one blog that I probably am the most regular reader of, not necessarily because the author writes well.

So I found this quiz he had taken about political philosophies. I really enjoy these quizzes, unless they are too long and take themselves too seriously, and very often the results do manage to capture some aspect of your beliefs. Of course, most people are so schizophrenic in their beliefs and viewpoints that any result in any quiz will be true to some extent. This one branded me a left-liberal, which is surprisingly accurate. I am not so sure about the economic part of this quiz though. The few questions asked aren't enough. The personal ones do seem to hit the mark better. (http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz-score/quiz.php)

According to the website:

LIBERALS usually embrace freedom of choice in personal matters, but tend to support significant government control of the economy. They generally support a government-funded "safety net" to help the disadvantaged, and advocate strict regulation of business. Liberals tend to favor environmental regulations, defend civil liberties and free expression, support government action to promote equality, and tolerate diverse lifestyles.

... Haal-e-Gulistaan Kya Hoga

Recently IBN had interviewed an American student at IIM Calcutta, and they put up the video yesterday on their website. After reading some of the comments there, I realized that without me 'dissing' my college, there are enough frustrated people out there with no lives and lots of inferiority complexes, who can do the job better. I should probably be a little more responsible and maybe even overlook some of the shadier aspects, which any way are outnumbered by the good ones.

This realization was also borne out of a discussion with the External Relations Secretary who had 'urged' people on our internal board to not make irresponsible posts on their blogs. I think I do exercise better restraint while making my posts (and I believe that!), but since I really do respect his opinions (yep, I believe that too!) I would at least not spice up the stuff I mention, if and when I do mention them. I am convinced that it was urging and not 'urging', btw.

By another way, this guy from the US, Travis, is a nice person. Not that I have interacted much with him, even though I am his mentor. He has a peculiar resume, and has moved around doing quaint things the way I have seen only Americans being able to afford to. There's an exchange student from the US too, who has done some weird things herself. But let's not get into that.

One very easy way to impress me is to talk about people like Descartes and Thoreau and Voltaire and Nietzsche as if you were born reading their theories. And Travis seems to have done his fair share of reading of the Waldens and the Thus Spake Zarathustras. After conquering Joyce and Woolf (Virginia, not Naomi), and even Hesse, though Pynchon still eludes me, I tried my hand at this Zarathustra book during my last year in Delhi. I gave up after the first few pages. Though I would like to believe (I do believe a lot of things without any basis, you might think - I believe you think wrong) that that's more because of the fact that I picked up the book after a nightout rather than it being a statement on my ability to grasp the nuances of philosophy.

I did make a brilliant presentation on rational thought and empiricism as part of a course in IITD.

Anyway, ignoring me, myself and I for a moment, it's interesting to see Travis trying to adjust to life in an educational institution in India. He does crib a lot, but takes a lot in his stride too, and has a higher opinion of our college than many superficially proud people I have known here. The red tape, which is still not as red as it could be for a red state, and definitely not as red as it gets in Delhi, gets to him at times. A good part of my opinion of Americans was based on their pop culture before I interacted with him and this exchange student, and in some ways it has been an eye-opener. A normal American student is probably as close to a typical US TV series student as a normal Indian saas-bahu relationship is to the stuff shown in the K-serials. My sample space is still too small though to pass a final judgment.

My fixation with movies, especially American movies, has got so strong it seems that every time someone mentions Travis, I think of a taxi.

Nothing like rambling pointlessly on the morning of an Open Book exam.

India Retires

I coined that phrase. I am not sure what I mean by it, but I claim copyright. Please pay me some royalty before you use it.

Of books and Bookers. And a film critic.

It's nice when you see good things being appreciated. It sort of makes you feel that not everything's wrong with the world. My favorite Indian film critic - Baradwaj Rangan - won the National Award for Best Film Critic this year. If you haven't read his reviews, go read a few. The link's there in my blogroll. What I like the most about his reviews, apart from the depth of knowledge this man has, encompassing the universe of Hindi, English and South Indian movies, is that in almost all cases he manages to find some redeeming feature in the movie. Critics aren't necessarily supposed to criticise. Very few of them realise that though.

And this book - the only one that has made me think and not speed-read in recent times - called The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid has been long-listed for the Booker. I haven't read any of the other books, so can't make any predictions, but it's a book powerful enough to win. OK, considering that I have liked almost all the books ever short/long listed for Booker, that does not hold much weight. It was selling for a substantial discount at one of the bigger bookstores here. The book-shop owners would be cursing themselves if it happens to get short-listed.

Mohsin Hamid's previous novel - Moth Smoke - was also a nice work. Not in the same league as this one, but special for me nevertheless because I bought it in Lahore. I didn't bring back much from Pakistan, at least not in tangible terms, and I treasure this book a lot.

While I study for the last exam of my last 1st year...

...the thought crossed my mind that all bloggers are so bloody conceited!

Of course, you already knew that, dinchya?

Dragostea Din Tei

I read somewhere recently that you are what you do in your free time. When I was in Delhi, I had loads of free time on my hands, and when I wasn't watching a movie or reading a book, I would be wading the hyperlinks of Wikipedia and IMDb.

Here, when on most days I am balking under the pressure of information overload, when I am not watching a movie or out partying, I spend time on YouTube. Post the (very boring) Oscars this year, I have been trying to look for past Oscar speeches on YouTube and elsewhere. The ones by Adrien Brody and Roberto Benigni are my favorites.

All that prologue is of course meant to introduce the link that I am going to give here. It was posted as a quiz on quiznet. Most quizzes there are really really bad these days, and the absence of some of the better quiz-makers of yore might be a case of idiots crowding out the intelligent ones. I ignore most quizzes posted on it these days, but thankfully didn't give this one a pass. It could have been a terrible quiz, but it's been redeemed thousand times over by giving all the videos mentioned in the questions on the original site of the author. I haven't seen most of these, but have heard people talk about them in the past. Hope you have a net connection fast enough for all these to load in a short enough time. And enjoy and thank me for bringing some much needed humor into your mundane lives.

Here's the link.

There and Back Again

After a hiatus of about five months, I am back to blogging. This is my third enocunter with the ubiquitous art (fad?) of blogging, and my first with Blogger. Hope to see my past readers back here.

Also, hope to be a little more restrained on this blog.

A proper post would follow soon enough.