Much ado about nothing

I would have never believed myself to be sitting right here wasting my precious time (yeah, right!) to write something just for the sake of it. And yeah, this one should come with a statuary warning: "Read only if you've free time and are not prone to insanity!" I've read somewhere that writing is really a therapy and helps you to relax and release the stress that you might have been holding up in your inside.

So I thought, why not? I'll do some more typing (it does hurt the fingers by the way) and try to relax. But on the other hand, its quite un-relaxing. When you've got nothing to write but still want to write, you have to apply a lot of pressure on the much ill-used brain. I'm precisely doing that at the moment. But these grey cells of mine which have been in the dormant state for a long time, seem to prefer that state and rebel against any stimulation.

My friend says that this is like writing an essay. But I disagree. In an essay, you know what to write abot and know in which channels to think in. This concentrates the thinking process and in the end you have to eventally get a result and you end up writing something because you've thought of something (or for the fear of losing marks). But writing something with a title as vague as the one I've given it, its very brain straining.


Some people might be wondering that why am I not writing an essay if I'm more comfortable with them. But I say that the literary skills that I possess are not to be wasted on writing horrible essays. In the prose collections I had to read and learn (read mug) in school, I always used to detest the essays and used to curse the writers fluently and wonder why do they write such things. I have a feeling that the writers of those essays specially bribed our textbook-setters to include their essays in our text-books so that we can be forced to read them and then they can happily brag while drinking in some cheap pub that so mjany children have read their respective works.

Now talking about drinking and bragging in some cheap pub, I don't drink in a pub so that's out of question. But what is questionable is the time I spend in writing such worthless pieces of crap that is not even worth reading (I'm glad you even reached till here), so why do I write such stuff? You see, its just to satisfy my sadistic pleasure of knowing that I've wasted some other people's oh-so-precious time by forcing them to go throgh this and given them great mental agony. Now you may ask, that I've wasted my time too and must be in a mental agony too. I agree. But did I tell you that I'm a masochist also?

Talking about masochists, do you like to inflict pain on yourself? Personally I prefer sadism. I mean the pleasure of watching pain be inflicted on others is really satisfying. Its too bad I won't be able to watch your faces as you go through this piece of (f)art, but I hope that my imagination won't boggle.

Talking about boggling imaginations, it quite happens when you're brain-dead (which I hope none of you are). Actually, I don't know what does brain-dead actually mean? I mean, isn't the brain dead when you die too? So why don't we call it simply dead? Or does it mean that the bodies continue to live (zombies!) and function without a brain? But what I think is that brain-dead is the term given to those brains which finally choke, spltter and die after being kept inside liquid biological preservative liquids on the various tables in a biological lab.

Talking about brains, have you ever touched a brain? It feels sort of gooey. But its very soft and nice. I never came close to smell it so I can't tell you about its aroma. Its odd how can a one-and-a-half-kilos weighing little mindless jangle of cells can run your whole body and thought. Isn't it scary to know that what
you think and learn and see and hear and taste and smell and remember is actually done in a little grey object? But if you learn using your brain, why do they call it "learning by heart"? And even when you sleep, the mind doesn't stop working but continues its processes to give you dreams (and/or nightmares). Working continuously without much rest for 70-80 odd years it is quite an efficient machine.

And talking about sleeping, if you aren't already snoring by your monitors, I think I'll end the torture right now.

A day at a Cafe

Let me describe the scene for you here. It’s a normal café. You know something akin to the Café Coffee Day s in India. Cafés are quite refreshing. The coffees, hot and/or cold, are a welcome relief when you want to take your time out and relax. Another of its plus points is that, you might just find some young, hot female refreshing herself, by having one beverage or another, to shift your heart into 4^th gear which had already begun skipping due to the caffeine entering the circulatory system. And if the Gods are smiling on you, that YHF might not be accompanied by a hunky, body look-alike of Vin Diesel. And if Lady Luck’s really doing overtime, why, you might even find a bunch of giggling YHFs to make the hot coffee cold or vice versa. So, there’s a guy in one such café and he’s in quite a hurry. So a waitress comes to take his order and…

Waitress: Welcome to Café coffee Catch-up. What is your choice for today? Classic, Mocha or Latte?

Guy: Classic, please.

Waitress: Regular, decaf or filtered?

Guy: Regular.

Waitress: With milk or without milk?

Guy: With milk, please.

Waitress: Normal, Skimmed or Low-fat?

Guy: Huh? Oh, skimmed.

Waitress: Paper, Recyclable or foam?

Guy: What?

Waitress: The coffee cup! You have to choose the type of coffee cup.

Guy: Oh okay, recyclable then.

Waitress: With cream on top or froth on top?

Guy: Uh… cream on top.

Waitress: Sprinkles?

Guy (now a bit flustered): I don’t want any.

Waitress: You’ve got to…

Guy (irritably): Oh, yes then. Look, I’m in a real hurry so just get me my order real quick, okay?

Waitress: Mild, medium or frightful?

Guy: Mild, medium or frightful what?

Waitress: Your type of hurry… is it mild, medium of frightful?

Guy (now angry): WHAT HAS THAT GOT TO DO WITH ANY OF THIS?

Waitress: I’ll put it down as “frightful”.

Guy: LOOK!!! (Takes a deep breath and relaxes himself) Look, I just want a regular coffee with milk with no bloody sprinkles on top or I’ll smack you one.

Waitress: Ooooh… Fist, open palm or Knuckle duster?

(There is a sound which the comics describe as “WHAM”)

Waitress (with a stuff upper lip): Thank you for your order… And oh, I forgot, there’s a special promotion so if you answer this riddle, you’ll have what you ordered for free… “What is black and blue and red all over?”

Guy (with extreme deliberate patience): That would be you if you don’t get my order… PRONTO!

Waitress: …. Right…. Away…. Sir!

Education vs Sex

Oh well, today I took the last exam of the finals of the 3^rd Year and now here I am totally jobless. Well, not exactly since I’ve got a lot of work to do like packing my whole room into a single trunk (which is almost magic… talking about magic, you should watch “The Prestige”, it’s a brilliant movie) but I’m not doing anything of my own choosing. Anyhow, I kinda digressed from the topic. So, as most of the regular reader’s of my “about me”s (which, by the way, are never about me) would know, when I’m forced to study, I get philosophical. But this time it was different. I actually wanted to study for once and I tried to find the advantages so that I’ll be motivated to study. But somehow, all I could compare it to was sex. Bloody Pervert! My findings on the USPs of education (referred to as “it”) over sex are as follows:

1. You can do it with members of the either gender and no one will raise an eyebrow.
   
   
2. If your parents walk in while you’re doing it with someone, no one gets embarrassed.
   
   
3. It’s not a crime to force someone to do it with you.
   
   
4. Most of it is done before marriage. That means, we have more experience in it by the time we are married.
   
   
5. And it’s okay to do it alone. In fact most prefer to do it that way (me included).
   
   
6. If you don’t do it, its nothing bad. You’re simply called “cool”.
   
   
7. Its not awkward to ask a member of the opposite gender to do it with you.
   
   

Well, after all this, I realised I was motivated enough to study and study I did. Oh, and please, don’t ask how my exams were.

Exams are just like one night stands: You do it and then you forget all about it. The sad thing is that you don’t enjoy exams while you’re doing it. Dammit!

SMS Tales

Everybody knows (or should know) how, when the exams are up close (and not to mention, personal), the students subconsciously develop an anomaly in their nervous system and do things they wouldn’t do if there were no exams (“studying” comes to mind as a good example). Anyhow, there I was, with just 3 days to go for the 2^nd TS and my brain, for the lack of a better word, began boggling. So, this time I, pretty much subconsciously, mind you, came up with the following question:

‘Do you think that I have the capabilities to be a sex bomb? You know like a suicide bomber in a red light area?’

and I typed it on my cell and messaged it to quite a few people in my contact list. And the responses I got were… well… you read and decide (I have taken up the liberty to change the messages so as to make them, grammatically and linguistically correct. And you cannot do anything about it because any message sent to me becomes my property thenceforth):

KJ: ‘Have you hurt your head or are you studying too much? What kind of a question was that? But if you still want an answer, disappointing as it might sound, it is NO.’

AN: ‘You can become one, no doubt. But I don’t think that you can be categorised as a sex bomb. I mean, at present. You lie in the category of “cute kids”’

MG: ‘You are capable of “blowing” away the competition as far as cracking deadly jokes in a red light area goes, but if you’re talking about blow jobs of a different kind, then I frankly cannot comment on that.’

MK: ‘What the fuck, man? Since when did you start spamming mobile phones?’

AA: ‘Since the first quality to be considered to be a sex bomb is “attractiveness”, I will have to say NO in your case.’

VM: ‘Bloody hell, you wake me up for this?’

RS: ‘You’re totally insane, you know? Go study or the only thing being bombed will be your grades.’

RK: ‘You know, I would have replied to you but I’m in a lecture and my prof says that I’m not supposed to use cell phones during one. You do believe me, right?’

And the only consensus I was able to deduce from it was: “With friends such as these, who needs enemies?”

Life's Philo

There are times when I get down to some real philosophical thinking. These are times when I, having nothing better to do, find it quite amusing, and not to mention quite intelectually stimulating, to wonder about the systems of life, living, the Solar system, the drainage system etc, and not necessarily in that order. And then, a few of you would know my deep and profound love for philosophy, given the fact that I withdrew from the elective after a couple of days of attending the course.

To begin with, you will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It's quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a chicken. Like most things, of course, it isn't quite that simple. The fried egg isn't properly a fried egg until it's been put in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn't do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It's all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while.

Now, come to think about it, life, too, is a pretty strange and complex thing in itself. It is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter. That life was "God given", was the only explanation we had for a long time. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes 'On the Origin of Species'. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made of anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it's just wonderful. And . . . the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.

Train Travails

When I was in Germany, travelling on a train from Munich to Koln, I happened to be accompanied by a certain person I didn't know of from previously. In other words, the man was a complete stranger, and thus, obviously, unbeknown to me. It was an early morning.

Not as early as the one when the birds come out to get their respective worms but early enough to still notice that the garbage collectors had done their job, and done it well. And, so, I was not in a very conversational mood, being inclined to increase the distance between the two jaws at every second second. And as he, too, seemed disinclined for chit-chat, we sat for some moments like a couple of Trappist monks who have run into each other at the dog races.

But devoid of anything interesting to occupy my mind with, I decided to initiate a thorough observation of the subject in consideration and then, maybe later, if I could, check the correctness of my results by engaging the subject in conversation. His face was, well, to say the least, hairy. Actually, I think it would be more appropriate if I said that where his face should have been, there was only a narrow, brownish, rectangular strip which seemed to form his forehead. And since the rest of the face was covered in dense, brown shrubbery that shrouded the rest of the features, that should have been noticeable, from afar the person would, rather, have looked like an airstrip in the middle of a forest.

And at this moment, while I was still deeply engaged in silent observation the forestry, which had hitherto not spoken, said, "Guten Taag!" It was a harsh, rasping voice, in its timbre not unlike a sawmill. Anyhow, knowing about as much German as is enough to insult a person, I figured the subject had finally decided to display his social skills with a greeting. And I, civil as I am, replied with quite a cheery "Hello". And just at this conjunction in time, the food trolley chose to appear. Feeling quite nibbly, I ordered a sandwich while my companion went for a cake. Choosing not to deprive myself of the chance to make some, hopefully, insightful conversation, I cheekily commented about the weather and, thus, managed to start it off, but, in English, of course.

He was not a man who prattled readily, especially in a foreign tongue. He gave the impression that each word was excavated from his interior by some up-to-date process of mining. And our conversation was not as smooth as I would have liked it to be, since my companion chose, from time-to-time, to steer the cake through the forest into the black pit that was his mouth and the mining machinery, once stopped, took quite some time to gear itself into action again.

Our conversation, though long in duration, was very short when measured with the number of words spoken. He, having an English vocabulary of a German dictionary, and I, having trouble hearing the words that reached my audal sensory organs after having been passed though the filter that was the overgrowth, had what one would call an almost, but not entirely, pointless conversation. All I can mention, if you would want to know, at this point, is that the sandwich was delicious and what I did after, in Koln, is another story.

Introduction

I have previously created three blogs and then proceeded forward to delete all of them on a verge of impulsive decisions. But being egged on by various individuals and the onsetting of boredom (which should arrive by the time I start my intern), I decided to give the whole blogging experience another shot, which now means it has four bullet decals. So to all the readers, welcome to my blog and I hope you enjoy the experience. And in case you don't like it, it will be my sadistic pleasure. So its either your pleasure or mine. Muahahahahaha...