Graybeard maven

He sits there stooped, so stooped that you wonder how he balances himself without falling off . His thick glasses hang precarioulsy over his nose, his eyebrows arched in a twitch, his matted beard, long and curly, his dust covered hair completely disheveled and his face, his face devoid of any vexation and completely absorbed in the task at hand. The walking stick sits still beside his bag like a sacred companion who helps him in his travails. His appearance, well its not something striking, like an old house destined to be demolished . He sports a shirt beneath a brown coat and brown matching pants, the tear and loose stitches indicate eons of rough use. he sits there in a solitary cloud, he doesnt look up to see the passing cars, he doesnt look up to see the hooting vehicles he doesnt look up to see the clear sky, he doesnt look up, he sits there stooped, the sidewalk his consecrated abode.

As we meandered through the traffic one early morning i spot him, i pass a passing glance and continue with the book i was reading. The next day i spot him again. The same posture, his one hand resting on his lap, his legs crossed, sitting sideways on the pavement inches from the moving vehicles. The following day i spot him again, but this time i take notice, held in his other hand is a newspaper, white crumpled and torn on the sides. He sits there hunched, his old baggy eyes fixed in concentration straining to read the newspaper, his wrinkled hands moving up and down the paper, his face contorted, the happenings of the world at his wrinkled fingertips. He must have been a freedom fighter, he must have been a goverment official, he must have been an noetic, he must have been somebody few decades ago, he must have been. I watch him everyday, not with sympathy but with admiration, i watch him but im just another face in the crowd peeping through the window, watching , and then moving on.

Voyeurism in the Virtual Vurld!

Ok if you still staring at that last word and wondering wht on holy earth it means, scratch your head no further, cos I couldn’t think of a word which starts with V! Gotcha there! Last week during our regular chai-meet I was humoured by this interesting conversation between my fellow othala members(thats our gang name, jobless, that’s wht it means).
“Dudeh, new rules on Orkut, you can’t view any random girls scrapbook or album unless you are on her friend list”, Othala exclaimed with that extra pinch of remorse.
“Abhe yaar then nobody will use Orkut ”, added Afzal.
“But isn’t Orkut a social netwroking site where you can get in touch with lost friends from school and college and stay connected with people you know”, I thought out loud. What a clumpsy thought!Duh! Obviously I was thinking wrong, cos all the people who come under the ‘Orkut addicts’ community use it for ulterior motives, profile hoping being the most common.
Orkut invaded my space back in college, and this networking site is presumed to be the brainwave of a strange guy who answers to the call of Orkut Buyukkkoten-somethign, what a highly laughabale and strange name I say. I reckon he started all this cos he was somebody who was extremely lonely, somebody who didn’t have friends all through his school and college days cos nobody could get his name right and took more than a couple of seconds tryin to get the pronounciation. This is what I presume would have happened.

*A game of hide and seek in the 60’s*
Kid A :: “..98,99,100, All ready im opening my eyes”
Orkut (thinking to himself) :: “If I jump from the corner of the bush and make ash for the dabba point, im sure to beat him”


With this brave thought he dashes to the pole or dabba spot, the denner(that’s wht the main guy was called) sees Orkut from the corner of his eye and runs in from the other direction,all the while pullin out his hair tryin to recollect his name.


Orkut (exclaiming with great joy):: “Dabba dabba dabba, you loose”
Kid A :: “Die fiend, die, I reached the spot before u did, but your name didn’t roll out of my tongue that’s why I didn’t hit dabba”
Orkut (oblivious of everything):: “Dabba dabba dabba”
Kid A :: “ &%^(*$, screw you, im going home”

Having being tortured by his friends since early childhood, Orkut lived a rather sad and solitary life. To win back his lost childhood and all the joys of hanging around with friends he decides to start a networking site. Jobless Brazilians and Indians lend support in this nobel cause and start scraping each other in the name of “friendship” and the rest as they say is a mystery, sorry history! When I started ‘orkuting’, it was more like a competiton. “That bitch has two friends and 5 scraps more than me, dammit, I better improve my stance here” was my only recurring thought, so I started hunting down lost friends like the end of the world was drawing close and scraping “Hi” to anybody and everybody who was online even if I had scraped them 10 “Hey” the past 3 min! Soon it got addictive, and by addictive I mean tallying scraps and friend requests every nanosecond! There is a downside to this fun way of holding on to friendship, your life is a open book. People prying through scraps and the albums can get a good amount of information about the person in question. Ok I admit even I have done that nosey thing! If the person is the straight-from-the-shoulder types you even have information of his/her eye or hair color and also relationship status, so if you honest and reveal that you are single, you’ll find a filthy lot of people with their sickeningly derogatory english asking you for “fraindship and to get in touch with the baasht friand available”. Shucks! This popularity led to the mushrooming of lot other networking sites like Facebook, where you can give a ‘hug’ to any stranger and your friends accquitances will automatically become your friends. This type of networking is indeed a good way to stay in touch with people ‘you know’ from different corners of the world and also a fun way to stay in touch with people you really don’t care a rats fart, like that guy in school who got away with ass licking all the teachers.

What kicked me off into writing this stuff is when I read an article in the paper which said that on Facebook any online purchases you do on the net will be intimated to your friends, so if you swipe that credit card and decide to duck into a bar of chocolates that information will be relayed to all your friends on the face of this earth. Christ Jesus, some random guy telling me im fat enough and those calories in the choc would just add onto my weight would be the last thing I would want to hear! Till the epidemic lasts revel in it but don't start looking at people as virtual objects, a human touch will do you more good then a virtual hug!

Tiny feats

Winter, wine, wool, what a way to usher in this festive season, and my typing that above link you made it doubly fun cos staring back at you is my 50th blog from the dork-talk blog factory. !Paradiddles! Ok the applauses are ringing in my ears, so you can all sit down now. Whats strange about those clapping is that, its coming from all corners of the world, now when I say “all corners” I really mean it, unless the sitemter is lying throught its teeth, a vitual liebite of sorts! So all you Scandinavian guys, I know it’s the dead of winter in your countries and half of your time is spent shut-in, but you could do better than typing random things on google like “retarded cherry yummy yummy”! Jesus christ, blondes are really dumb I say!

From here on ill be dwelling on the past, the howz and whyz of my blogging story. Way back in March when the heat was really taking its toll on us, and venturing out in the afternoons was like sacrilege(I didn’t want to increase the revenues of fairness creams!) I decided to write stuff, and by stuff I mean random shit which require minimal levels of intelligence to comprehend. The start didn’t start of with a bang as expected, I had to resort to bribes, coaxing people with bitti stuff etc to get them to read my blogs. Bravo, bravo, they all cried out, those goons were after more bitti stuff, so I gathered. Some of my other friends, the critics that they are, called by blogs self-indulgent gibberish, ahem! I pardoned them for those sweet words cos I didn’t want to loose friends and become a troglodyte. But inspite of all the brickbats and drumrolls, blogging opened up a whole new world, a world I have slowly started taking comfort in, a world were boredom is non-existant and forty winks is something I have completely eliminated from my weekend afteroon agenda.

Men and the Melanin Mess

The sun is beating down hard, and across the paddy fields a group of guys are soaked up in a game of snake&ladder, the huge mango tree along the dirt track provides them with that much needed respite from the late evening sun. I walk upto those 13-14 year old fellas and ask why they aern’t playin running and catching or hide and seek games that I used to indulge in when I was around their age. A young lad looks up from the board, points up and says “look at how hot it is, we are scared we would get tanned and chechi, the mallu sun-burned look is out!”. Now now now, I stood their shocked, when did the word ‘melanin’ take the fun out of young guys. That shock is what woke me up from my sleep, and the dream guys, was fostered by the recent SRK ad, where our dude with arithmetically correct ab's promotes a fairness cream sayin "gora banne kha instant blah blah (fuck knows what)". Well i would have loved to know what he said in that ad but i couldn't resist pressing that remote button.

On a recent visit to H&G with friends this cosmetic enlightment hit me on my face. As I was walking between the racks of soaps and creams and shampoos, a different variety of creams stopped me on my track, staring from the rack were a dozen or so pancy loooking men, with clear exfoliated face, shaped eyebrows and white bleached skin, and above their faces in white bold letters were written the words “Fairness Cream for men”. Going by the number of skin whitening creams on display and the sheer number of companies making these products I looked like indian men were considering this cosmetic wonder as the next best thing after Viagra! Whatever happened to the tall-dark-handsome look that sent girls crooning on their knees, i guess the likes of Dhoni and small B sure need to go someplace else.

I still remember my teenage years when we would sit oogling at the jungle wonder,Tarzan, his strong calloused hands, nice even sun-tan, unruly chest hair and unkempt hair could now be considered passe, whats in is the manicured-pedicured-exfoliated metro sexual male. Hah! I think this whole cosmetic enlightment among indian men started with our very own SRK bathing in a tub full of milk, with rose petals strewn in to create the atmosphere and clearly glowin in this new found skin, yeah yeah its the Lux Ad. This triggerd another series of Ad’s where men clearly conscious of their melanin infused skin goes snooping into his mothers or sisters closet to steal creams. Probably men were always conscious of their looks and these ad's are just fuelling that innate desire, the no of creams in the market should be an acting proof. Whatever it is the fairness cream companies are not complaining, for them things wouldn't have looked errr...fairer !

Cradle to the grave, a short journey indeed...

It not true what they say about the past-you can bury it, the past can leave a scar, deep enough to be visible through all your years. The past is what she’s been trying to grapple since that fateful day.
“I’ll see you all in the evening, after my exams, bye ”, Sandra heard her sister scream out these words before zipping off on her bike. “Awrite, good luck, bye” , she called out but her voice was muffled by the roaring engine. That was the last she saw her. The events that unfolded later during the days seemed to her as irrational and surreal as a dream, her sister wrapped in white, her body motionless and farely unscathed, her face a picture of placidity, the funeral pyre beside her and her shell-shocked family all around…
Our life hangs precariously, one moment you live a blissful existence, and the next moment you at the gates of the heavenly abodes. ‘Live every moment’, this is one of the most cliched phrases you get to hear but what I witnessed last weekend made me realise that you should indeed live every moment cos you never know if you’ll be around long enough to smell the evening bloom. I’ll not be able to fathom her grief, the condolences will not help in filling that deep void her sister left behind and life for her will not be the same, but these are the things that forms the crux of our miniscule existence. When I read about people who meet an untimely end I think to myself, it always happens to somebody else but we are also a ‘somebody’ to someone else. Drive carefully, death is lurking is every turn and every move you make.

Meliorating spectator fervour

My friends claim it to be the most dramatic climaxes to the Formula One season. The Brazilian grand Prix saw Kimi snatch away the championship from favourite Hamilton who eroded right from the start. I logged onto the g-talk today morning and saw a plethora of status msgs like “Go KIMI”, ”Kimi yeah, Dig it alonso”, ”Kult Kimi Konquers yet again” and pure simple plain ones like “Kimi!!” (some ppl even wrote that in a mix of upper n lower case). Its pretty obvious that a lotta of my friends follow F1, and to get along with them you have to learn how to talk F1. To me, these phrases may not have a lotta meat on them but an average 20 year something guy can use them to keep a conversation going for hours.Phew! So I was hooked last night watching the Brazilian Grand Prix trying to figure out the Driver Standing, Consturctor Standing, funda behind Compound tyres blah blah for the pure sweet simple reason;I could activley participate in the F1 discussions! So much for being ‘cool’ I say. As I saw the sleak, shiny, colorful machines go round and round with that annoying mosquito-buzz like sound I thought, they can turn this mundane boring sport into a truly exciting, dangerous and audience-grabbing one by adding some view-excitement. We could achieve this by diggin up deep pits(slightly bigger than the cars) at unmarked locations, so everytime the driver takes a turn he would have to swerve his machine to avoid fallin into the pit. This would result in a lot more collisions and ‘pit-falls’! woo! We could extend this concept by spilling some super slippery oil or grease, also at unmarked locations which would send the cars flying in different direction. Yeah baby now we talking Sports! They sure to rake in millions! Why do we have to stop this view-excitement concept to F1 alone, we could extend this to other sports also. Read on..
Golf
Yawnn! Few sports are as dull as professional golf.Any imbecile in his right state of mind wouldn’t spend precious time watching this but when a beehive is placed right above the flight of the ball, it demands a more flawless swing on the part of the golfer and boy! lets not even get to the exhilaration part of it. We could make it even more challenging by placin a deadly hornets nest right beside the hole, this simple handicap will attract even greater violence and tragedy loving fans will sure be screaming for more.

Sking
Come winter olympics and all you get to see is sking, sking and more sking. Currently all that the professional skiers do is lazily wind down the hill bending and turning and bumping. Simply chaining hungry lions and tigers and grizzly bears to each flag will demand more precision and greater challenge from the sportsmen. Woohoo!

Volleyball
A game that mainly consists of jumping, smashing and hitting some really fast balls that any sensible person cannot return back makes volleyball a big “So what?”, but placing some really sharp barbed wires above the net will turn a simple foul into something really foul. Sponsors bank accounts will turn green as the sand soaks in all that red!

Shooting
Concentration, silence and no movement, a game like this can put you to sleep inadvertently, but don’t loose heart brother we could spice it up with some bikini-clad babes doing the honour of holding the dart boards. We could also make the boards reboundable so if the arrow doesn’t pierce through the eye it would revert back towards the shooter. Viewers will sure pony up big bucks to watch it!

Basketball
Ok lets not touch this game cos its excting enough. What with all the rebounds, cheerleaders, 7foot tall dunkers and cuttie-pie Tony!

Distanced from reality

“… its not only the war that’s disturbing, our freedom is curbed in that flea ridden place”, my uncle retorted when I asked him how his stay in Bangladesh had been. He had a far away look in his eyes when he thought back on his 6yrs tenure there. The stories he told shook me up, the two leading candidates contesting the election have criminal records to boast, and they are both ladies, the army has taken over from the government, the whole country is engulfed in a political turmoil, with fourtneen different heads of government and alteast four military coups. Woo! I sat spelbound listening to all this, the army has banned all private TV stations and the national media is under censorship, shucks!so much for freedom. A couple of days back Bharghav had written this blog, which gave us an insight into the terrible times we live in. India is sure trampling on troubled waters with nobody to steer us clear of all the hullabaloo happening around. For starters we have the whole nation fighting over the existence or non-existence of a blessed bridge, then we have the media and ahmm junta fighting over whether jail is the place to be for a guy who gave the world the term gandhigiri. Sheesh, our nation is a story of how far from reality we have truly come. We need to open our eyes wider, open it wider to take in the situation happening around us. So as a nation are we really screwed up? I don’t think so.

Nestled between the two mighty oceans we have a country which was once called ‘pearl of the indian ocean’, the pearl is tarnished beyond repair. After years of peace, Sri Lanka has again plunged into a conflict between the government and the Tamil tigers popularly known as the LTTE. Peace remains plagued in this war torn country which has witnessed ceasefire followed by killing without impunity and an economy which is still coming to terms with the upheaval.

Thousand of inocent monks in their orange robes were mercilessly shot to death. I watched with sympathy the horrors unraveling on the streets on Burma these last few weeks. When Aung Kyi (she is so breathtakingly beautiful!) won the last election there was much joy, but it was short lived cos the military took over entirely- the govt has been invisible since then. Half the population is in some kinda forced labour and reports say AIDS is ravishing the country ferociously. Denying human rights, killing, and using rape as a war against minorities is wht Burma/Myanmar fights everyday thanks to the military regime.

This place boasts of eight of the world’s ten highest peaks but at the apex of it all is a constitutional monarchy that is very close to becoming a Maoist state. The aristocratic king has lost all his power as head of state and army thanks to Maoist rebels and new political leaders who want to completely overthrow the monarchy.If the Maoist seize power then the kiling, kidnapping, torturnin and bombing happening now will look pale in comparison.God forbid something like this happens !

China is one of the worlds oldest civilization but its economic progress the last couple of years is almost scary! This rapid urbanization has resulted in over 50million farmers(yeah u read the figures right,no wonder they are the most populous in the world!) loosing their farmlands. We might be sharing their problems of population and corruption but here we atleast have the freedom of gathering up a group of like minded ppl and walking down the streets hurling abuses at the government !

This country is a piece of cake. Musharaff said “lets have a general election and elect our leader”, sure enough an election was held and a general was elected! Military dictatorship statred 10 yrs back, parlimant was disbanded, constitution was suspended and the country plunged into a monetary debt from which it has still not recovered. An ex-prime minister who was ousted in a coup detat and a woman ex-prime minister who is contesting the election have both been in exile. What pakistan needs is an end of the military regime for it to gain ground from the bombing and killings that has plagued it for over a decade.

We are not so screwed afterall. Am I happy? Oh hell yes!