Snips and Snails and Puppy-dog Tails

The Engineer in You

2011-03-16T21:03:00.006+05:30

Keeping up with the one post a year tradition, I would like to reassure my faithful readers, all four of you, that life hasn't changed. General boredom and occasional drunkenness, interrupted by brief moments of unspeakable horror. It is at this stage of life that the parents and loved ones give you the grim euphemistic reminders we all hear - the difficulty of finding a good liver or lung for transplant, the cost of a paternity case, the importance of Karma, chameleons, the munni-sheila debate, and so on and so forth.

People enquire about the deeper purpose of your life. Why this road, the enquirer asks. Your eyes shift and you search for a new course of conversation, but to no avail. For the enquirer does not give in. He looks at you, his eyes to yours. His fingers probe deeper into your behind, searching for reason good enough to mock you, testing your forbearance, Before you know it, 4 years have passed, but the enquirer's fingers are still up your ass. You're clueless as fuck, you don't know how to make them go away. You learn how to live with it, but its not the same anymore. You now have a tramp stamp, and you have to live with it. Society can't be blamed for everything, but did you have a choice?

And then the end of the era beckons, and so do the endlessly long corridors walks, pretence of not hating cigarette smoke being blown into your face, photos of the backs of grown ass men peeing, really bad jokes, singling out and dissing a different person everyday, you get the gist. You get yourself together at the end, wondering if you're gonna miss the circus you used to live in. Maybe a little?

You're not sure anymore. But it helps when you have something to look forward to.

Bongs - and why you should avoid them

2009-12-01T20:15:00.008+05:30

The Bong body was once famous for being a rigorous piece of engineering, but it slowly became but an excuse to cover the most potent weapon known to mankind , the Bong brain. Years ago, when they were asked by the Universal Creator(read: Jothi-babu) which organ they would like to make robust and strong, the people of Bongland, who just got out of their favourite sport- killing people randomly(which the world mistook for communal riots) replied unanimously, 'My Brain'. Jyoti-babu subsequently ensured that the prices of fish, specially Ilish (Hilsa), Horlicks, radio sets and beedis were capped to ensure a generous supply of brain juice. Where a Punjabi would use his body or a South Indian his charm to woo women, the Bong does so purely on the strength of his intellect. The intellect of the Bangali is inversely proportional to his height, they say. Which is also why Bongoshontans have spent generations hooked to developing aptitude from reading Aggarwal and solving sums from SP Basu and KC Nag.
The Bong's lifelong obsession with food (which being the reason for the fall of many an otherwise successful marriage) is well documented and observed. Take, for instance, the parting of the Bong plate into four careful quadrants, a subject of furious debate by food critics all over the world. One quadrant consists of a lemon that is green on the outside, which men savour with a somewhat kinky look on the face, the lobon, or common salt, and the most vital part of the plate, the cornerstone of the Bengali meal, the kacha lanka, or green chilly, which they bite with their rightmost incisor pair. For this reason, this quadrant of the food plate is also called Sri Lanka (a family joke). The second, third and fourth quadrant would be white rice that is heaped like a small hill. Part of the first course would inadvertently be a dhal, that floods half the plate and which is sensuously squeezed through the Bong's fingers.
This dhal might have debris and leftovers of the head of fish, which the Bong would suck erotically through the gaps of the bones, with a noisy slurp. This historical slurp is losing its charm though, becoming looked down upon. So much so that the All India Trinamool Congress has taken note, who's lifelong aim is to protect our noble farmers, our rich Bengali culture and set fire to pretty much everything else. Robindroda used to do this(the slurp, not the AITC), and look at him, he won a Nobel. Mamatadi used to do this too(both the slurp and the AITC), till Buddhu-da told her its cool only when men do it. Sourav Ganguly does it too, but don't tell a Bangali that, okay?
Nothing would shock and appall an educated and respected Bong bhodro lok (gentleman) more than to learn that his society or friend, (preferably another Bong) has never heard Rabindra Sangeet, supports Salgaocar FC, does not rub his potbelly in public, fails to see the point in 'I don't eat fish, I eat only Ilish'(another family joke), works for a Non Bangali Boss, does not know his native village, does not watch Star Jolsha, does not speak English with the accent, does not use the term 'marketing' instead of 'shopping', does not part his hair, does not eat his egg roll, does not pronounce 'rasam' as 'rosom', and does not know the difference between a Marxist and a Maoist.
They think they own art. Well, sure they got a large number of poets/singers/actresses/miss universes, but its per-capita wise pretty consistent. They don't understand that its because of the large number of Bongs. It was part of Jothi-babu's plans of world domination- when the population control era began, Jothi-da was left fuming as he wanted more Bangalis, as he had invested money in Ilish maach production. So what does he do? He creates an Elite committee to recruit skilled labourers from Bangladesh to jack open every condom vending machine in the state and poke 2 holes in every condom. (one for stuff, the other for air). When people lost faith in condoms, these labourers got fired and they got pissed off and joined the Naxalites.

Besides, only a Bong would say 'May Dada hit a century, but India still lose to Bermuda. Serves Kiran More right. And that Greg Choppol, bashtard'.

Chicken soup for the songi soul

2009-09-05T18:14:00.007+05:30

Yes, I haven't blogged for a year. Yes, I spend Saturdays online on gtalk. And yes, I wish I could speak Japanese. What with all the loonies on earth doomed on goodness makes out when to end their sick hedonistic life, which isn't too far away, that theory created by those god forsaken sons of a what not. They made it so believable, I'm rejoicing. I wish I died at 32 though. That's like the time when thoughts stir into your head that getting laid isn't exactly the greatest of pedestals that humans dreamt of stepping on on a large, long term scale, historically speaking.

You wake up every morning to be the morbid you that you planned to be before you fell asleep that previous night. Yes, I shall write that record. Yes, I shall mug up that transmission lines derivation. Course I will clean the windows of the house, inside and outside. And for sure,I shall align source code to keep my oh so apparently non frivolous dsp lecturer happy, just so I get the bare minimum in the internals that a person needs to get through so as to keep the past semester past. And then you wake up, stare at gtalk all day, and die. Google, what would I do without you?

Songi bastards.

Imagine

2008-08-01T18:32:00.002+05:30

Bomb blasts, regicides, kidnaps, extortion, Indians molesting Britons in India, Indians molesting Indians in Britain, Britons molesting Indian kids in ..well, India . . .

"When aye grow aap, I weel make won beeg news channel showing wanly good news."

My niece sure is small(secaand standard C secshan), yeah, Lalu Prasad style thinking, yeah, but that did make sense. Maybe when I become filthy rich, by some stamp paper scam, bribe a politician to raise a tax cut issue in parliament that'll work on my side, hoard up goods when prices are on nitro, ...

We could fuck the machine till the system blows up, or till we blow ourselves up, the machines that we are, and publicize that the world needs change, and do what we do best about terrorism, condemn it. Or, sit in our cushioned merry-go-round chairs, and blog about it.

Lennon sure could imagine a world with no heaven or hell, religion or people, no not even sex.
He had the cojones to. Sugar coated it, he did, to make you think its the most beautiful song in the world, but he meant it. No big deal, everybody say, he sits in an airconditioned room in London, or wherever, writes a song when he has a bank balance bigger than yours, and then sleeps with his wife for a month in public, smoking pot, lifts a couple of fingers and tells you to come to Nutopia. But he did.

Hell, he got shot at too. Some mofo comes at you with a derringer and drills a couple of bullets into your appendix, shouting God Fuck You or something like that, in some language you didn't care to study when you were in school. Not much you can do about it, yeah. Or blow you up with lil lakshmi-vedis targeted from a mobile phone.

Then you sit at home, schools and colleges closed for a few days, and swear at the government, swear at the sniffer dogs, swear at the havaldars, swear at your neighbour, swear at his mom who lives in Kerala... Life is screwed up, your pet parrot soon picks up your language and now can talk foul-mouthed shit in sixteen different tongues, your neighbour loses his temper and gets a heart attack yelling at his eight year old kid for flunking in his social studies exam, the sniffer dog dies of fatigue, that after biting half a dozen people who didn't realize that the dog was rabid, and the police blow their stupid whistles and breaks apart every couple or meeting of three or more in the street... but that's not the point I'm trying to make.

What the fuck is my point anyway?

#Sammok

Tagged!

2008-07-28T17:41:00.006+05:30

I'll kill Jubli later.

I am : your worst nightmare. No I haven't watched Batman yet.
I think : that you need a life.
I know : that Oscar Wilde wasn't gay and that Paris Hilton is a virgin. I do.
I want : to marry anybody who sings like Alanis.
I have : to write my math assignment. (insert swear words)
I wish : there was a multiplex near my coll, or in it. You can't bunk and go nowhere, can you?
I hate: songi peoples. :P
I miss: school. *sob*
I fear : that I'm becoming thin. Oh, am I?
I feel : that condoms are called condoms for a reason.
I hear : Page and his guitar. He can't be human.
I smell : a rat.
I crave : for ice cream. No, panipuri. Yes.
I search : for my glasses. All the time. I gotta search for em without em. How ironic.
I wonder : why people don't take laxatives when they don't give a shit to my blog posts. (Ok, pj.)
I regret : not studying for tomorrow's test. :))
I love : my friends, my teachers, my neighbour, my neighbour's dog, . . .(insert more swear words) Ok, get the first item off that list.
I ache : for ... I dunno.
I am not : who you want me to be.
I dance : like pappu.
I sing : like Cobain.
I cry : never. I don't. Haven't, actually. Ok, maybe. Go play ball or something, sheesh.
I don't always : brush my teeth.
I fight : not.
I write : shit.
I win : imaginary battles.
I lose : Burnout. :) More often than not.
I never : say a sentence without a swear word.
I always : start reading a magazine or a newspaper from the end.
I confuse : <--- self explanatory sentence.
I listen : to lectures, yeah. (swear words)
I can usually be found : in my house, not.
I need : Salma Hayek. Interested?
I am happy about : life. Eej hard, yeah, but I'm happy. Could've been better yeah, but am happy.
I imagine : a world that makes sense. It doesn't, now. And I know I'm part of the reason why.
I tag : Subhash, Ashwin and Darth Vinode.

#Sammok

Seniors and Senioribility

2008-07-07T18:34:00.005+05:30

One year back.

Dumb Senior (obviously talking to respectful juniors for the first time in his life) : Dey.
Me : Oh. Hi.
DS : I had to call you twice.
Me : Oh. I didn't notice.
Dumb Senior 2 : You didn't notice?! (some slight class 3 tamil swears)
Me : No.
DS2 : Er..next time, notice. (spoiling the whole effect)
DS : Wokay. Name, department, area, song.
Me : Eh?
DS : You have a name, no?
Me : (after making up my mind to check in the mirror after getting home if my face had 'English Only' written all over it) Yeah. Sammok.
DS2 : What?
Me : Sammok. EC.
DS2 : What's that?
Me : My name.
DS2 : What does it mean?
Me : (in no mind to humour him) I dunno.
DS : Wokay, which area you are in?
Me : Main block, 4th floor, 403.
DS : Oh. Hostel a?
Me : No. Day.
DS : You live in the classroom or what?! (annoyed)
Me : No. From Korattur.
DS2 : Why your name is like that? (meaning : why is your name weird?)
Me : I dunno. Must be boring to have a normal name.
DS2 : Anyway, what song?
Me : (with genuine disinterest) I can't sing!
DS : Come on, mobile battery down da, konjam entertainment, please.
Me : I don't know any Tamil songs.
DS : Okay, sing English. You know Titanic song, no..?

... ... ...

One year later, after results.

DS : Hey da mama.
Me : Hey.
DS : How many?
Me : 75.
DS : Dogg! I asked how many! Not how much! (very very annoyed, but with slightly better English)
Me : Oh. None. You?
DS : You are EC da. Naye passanga.(dog people, literally) I've got 6 standing from last sem.
Me : Heh.
DS : What's so funny?
Me : That girl you asked me to give that letter to, from EEE, she's got 6 too.

Moral : Seniors are dumb. You'll be a senior one day too. I am one, now. Learn.

Monsoon blues

2008-06-03T12:00:00.009+05:30

Its hot and I want it to rain. Who loves June anyway?
Well, think again.

Monsoon in this city is a weird thingy

-some guy I know.

A couple of years back, in school, Ruby, my chemistry teachie, called it a day.

Smack in the middle of the monsoon, it wasn't unusual to see School Road completely drowned. The common man from School trying to reach home before dark(read: me) would be left with two alternatives, he either take the long walk to the bus stop, or seek refuge from the rain under a tree or inside a shop or the ice cream parlour opposite school, where they conveniently turned off thea air conditioners in that stupid humidity, so you would get wet anyway.

Being sort of an experienced campaigner, I chose the former. Trudging along the alleys trying to avoid the puddles of mud, a friend of mine, Karthik Murali, frowned.
"The Heavens must be really pissed with us."
"Do They have to piss this hard?"

Hordes of people walked about, all armed with umbrellas, and we'd try and take peeks inside the pink ones. Trying to remember the last time I carried an umbrella, I made my way through the narrow labyrinth of dry road there was, and was then on my own in the bus stop, my shoes crunching the soft mud underneath me. I was all alone from here. Muttering silent curses to the so-called-friends who ditched me, I waited for the 41D, to take me home to civilization. I also did not want to miss The Simpsons at six, I think.

45 minutes, a dozen swears, a few toppled trees and a motorcycle accident later, the big green monster finally came, humanity pouring out of its every orifice. I attached a couple of limbs firmly to it, one to a handle and the other to the last step of the footboard, and it pulled me along. I got drenched, motorists from behind were shouting at me, and the humongous bag which I was carrying brushing against every tamil movie poster on the buildings. I reached home and surveyed the damage done : the top of all my books were blue, the little Chinese mp3 player I had stopped working, plus a few bruises on my elbow.

Life doesn't get any better I guess.

Random messages every loser gets

2008-02-02T17:20:00.002+05:30

Its crazy. Since the advent of free sms, people think they can get away with anything. I'm not talking about 'the sms lingo', (which I can't stand anyway). They don't have the urgency of a telephone call, nor the sophistication of an email, and we still tap away those buttons to glory.

Imagine being woken up in the middle of your night, courtesy(or the lack of it) some bummer with a barnacle for a brain. The top 5.

5. Did you know that the Vietnam Civil War was marked by many instances of uncivil behaviour?
"Yeah. Apparently, Elvis ate his blue suede shoes as a gesture of peace. In his grave, so nobody noticed."

4. Its a caterpillar trying to become a butterfly.
"Its a dung beetle that is trying to keep me awake."

3. Don't you Fidel with my Castro.
"You and your crooked ."

2. Vinod likes custard apple.
"Sammok likes custard apple pie steamed with portions of Vinod's liver."

1. Hi. I finished E.G. Looking forward to see you standing outside class tomorrow. Bye.
" Hi. Canteen food tastes not so bad. I'll spend all day there tomorrow. Bye."

#Sammok

My Grudge 2

2008-01-13T07:45:00.001+05:30

Well, kick me. I mean it. *shows butt*

I bought tickets for that damn movie, I thought, oh yeah, its big city multiplex, a lotta cute chicks sit next to me, the pop corn tastes like its fit for kings, the toilets smell of roses,.. . Funny when you enter a mall, everybody think they own the place, even the security dudes. The movie released a million years back, but we bought it because of desperation, lack of anything else to watch cause it was a Saturday, and because half of us never watched an A movie before. (we couldn't show any age proof, but that's another story).
Things that make you go #*^#%!@*#^@!(#&)!@&$#%

The humans here keep it simple, easy to understand for us extraterrestrial folk.The men dress so as to impress the women, and they speak English with a brilliant half-American, half-Thanjavur accent. The women dress so as to lie about their waistlines, and speak Tamil with a half-Caribbean, half-Liverpudlian accent.

The movie started with a message "Welcome to inox(duh)".

I don't remember the supposed horror movie very well, only that I was laughing my ass off as the good looking mature women with no sense of humour tortured, raped and killed cats, men and bears dressed in Japanese miniskirts, and in the process left the kind of goo which you'd normally find in baby diapers after a blissful night of snivel-less slumber. They made weird sounds like the pan Indian husband behaving like an animal in bed(snore like horses) and they snort like a laughing hyena and they fart like a bear who just finished the honey supply. Wasting 250 for this movie is advisable if you are heir to Vijay Mallya, but it would make more sense to throw it to those weird Hare Rama Hare Krishna people so that they can have a haircut.

Typically, the story is simple. Its based in Japan, and the Japanese have no sense of humour. A girl enters a house, and for some strange controversial and extremely confusing reason, the girl is sexually unsure of herself, and visits a supposedly haunted mansion for no reason so that she can show off her friends that Americans are cooler, and slimmer, and taller, and pull off Paris Hiltons everyday. For the same reason, half the script is in Japanese, or Bengali, or something, and the other half is like "In Japanese schools, it is morally wrong for women to go out on a date without eating sushi". And for that exact same reason, the girl then experiences ghosts who try to kill her, and people around her, and then she realizes that she's a ghost too, and she, unbelievably, kills an old hag she met in Kyoto who told her that she stole the pubes of some dead man who died in that stupid haunted house and then does them for them because they told them to do them. That's what the movie was about. Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it.

*types so hard that keyboard loses a few keys. Replaces the damn keyboard.*

The ending was brilliant.

Girl in white : Its the house, its the house, its the house

Woman in red : Its your imagination, dear. There's nothing wrong with the house.

GIW : Hey, you, get away from me, get away from ME!

*Strange screeching sounds, a wham, a couple of burps, and then all the menfolk in the hall get big grins and all the womenfolk cling on tighter to their boyfriends. And the few sensible ladies, not willing to show the world they're scared, starts laughing out loud, and the few sensible menfolk, who had no accompanying womenfolk, starts wondering if the bouncer in black at the back was human to have gone through this shit everyday. Then Woman in Red transforms, strips, becomes blue with long hair(a lot of hair) and something happens, then something else happens, then the two start fighting*

GIW : My husband is a cop! He'll accuse you!

WIR : Oh, you've got a husband? Ah, I see. Before I eat you, give me his number.

GIW : You....you...you...monster!

WIR : Monster? How dare you? I'm only 28. GOBBLE, AARGH, SNORT, RIP, CRUNCH, SLOBBER, CHOMP, EEEK

GIW : GRUNT, SNORT, HACK, GLURG

*the two continue fighting and hacking and chopping and decapitating each other's bodyparts, then fade to black, then credits roll*

Audience : What the fuck?! That's an ending?!

Vinod : What were you expecting, you old geezers? Come back next year to watch The Grudge 3! And hope inflation keeps low, so you won't have to pay more.

Bouncer : Okay, the exit that's way, thank you visit again.

Cristo : The next time we go for a horror movie, we make sure that we ...

EVERYBODY : Next time??!!

Robbed, stripped, humiliated, and then they hope to see me again. I'm flattered.

#Sammok

Confessions of a born junk-foodie

2008-01-04T07:09:00.001+05:30

"To eat is human, to completely digest divine"
- Socrates

It had been a long time I had been in front his cart, gorging on Rajasthan's finest panipuris, or so he called them.
"Kya saheb, badi beejee ho aajkal?"

My sidekick in streetfood misadventures, D, had the instinctive reply, Saheb here is on a diet. He smirked.
"Samose, bhelpuri, masala puri,.."
"Two channa samosas."

I usually eat on the street with my army of connoisseurs of fine street food, and it is then that the most unearthly of remarks escape our chutney filled mouths.
"That girl looks like she's 32 da"

Its not very difficult for the seasoned sightadichifier to comment on a girl's details(and very accurately at times too!) if she's married, if she has kids, if she wanted kids, if she didn't want kids, if she looked like she wanted kids, if she wanted you to think she wanted to have kids, if she was going to buy vegetables, if she had slept with Robert Redford, if she believed in communism, if she had lice in her hair, if she thought your glasses were geeky or if Stephen Hawking's stupid automatic wheelchair ran over your cat.

"Extra meetha daalna"

He was a role model to most. I mean, just look at him. There he would be serving all the cute lookin chicks, takes a leak in the gutter behind him every now and then, and then washes it all down in that famous panipuri's pani, when there are no customers around he sits and scratches his privates, we even calculated that he makes atleast 500 a day. He sometimes had to pay the mamu(the cops) I guess, but then that's hardly any to enter his big accounts. What the fuck am I doing in an engineering college?!

"Ishh, Riju, how do you eat such muck?", said an old lady my Mum used to know when she was little when I went to(well, forced to) her place one day. "God knows what' he puts in those what-do-you-call-them he makes." I was a seasoned receiver of her renowned lectures she usually gave to people whom she thought were reclusive,and i expected one no different.
"Aw come on, its good for us, increases immunity doesn't it?"
She was a gourmet, a bon vivant, the opposite of our breed. She wasn't too keen to oppose my view though, she hated arguing with pesky little kids. So I had my way on this one.

"Machan, you pay da. I'm still overdrawn on my allowance from BOD(Bank of Dad)"
"Sheesh"

I looked at the panipuriwala. He was pretending to rearrange the clutter of bottles on his cart, which strangely resembled my study, only he actually worked in all the mess. Maybe it wasn't a mess for him, maybe it was order, he had to make do with whatever little space was given to him, and he used it. Then the difference hit me. He used space, I wasted space. Then my friend pulled out a hair(yeww) from his plate of panipuri, and we were afraid to ask where it came from.

"Kitna?"
"Toowenty phour, saheb"

Saheb pulled out a twenty, which the panipuriwala put in his moneybox without even glancing at it.

Regulars always got a discount.

#Sammok