Figurewatching!

Well I guess u can't make much out of the picture. It's actually showing me as the 1001st visitor of my own blog. I had a big promo and all worked out in mind for the 1000th visitor and all that, but in the end, missed it by a whisker. (Actually the 1000th visitor was to be promised a big dinner and night together with John Abraham/Aishwarya Rai, depending upon his/her orientation)

So until 10,000 next time, THANKS FOLKS, and be my guest always!!!!

End of innocence

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Mutilation:(noun) [mu·ti·la·tion] An act, the process, or the result of inflicting serious injury on a person or animal or part of somebody or something’s body by removing or destroying parts of it.

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Hello everyone,

I am a normal guy.
Sorry, that’s incorrect, I used to be a normal guy. Till yesterday.
I used to go to college, and I had ambitions, and dreams.
I was madly in love with a girl in my college, and I was going to talk to her today.
Now I wont, because I don't deserve her anymore. And I’m probably impotent now.
I used to have exactly 206 bones in my body, not a single one more than that.
I had a handsome face (Not my opinion alone).

I used to be a normal guy.

I peed in my pants during my freshman year, when my seniors had called me up for the ‘ritual’.
This used to be a secret I wouldn’t tell anyone, not even my wife when I am married.
But now, I wont pee in my pants, even if the Tyrannosaurus Rex himself incarnates in front of me during midnight. I pee through a tube, without even me realizing it, all day, all night.
By the way, the nights are too long now. It wasn’t like this before, till yesterday.

When I used to be a normal guy.

Till this happened…

Hyperlinkophobic!

I don’t like the proliferation of the hyperlink - culture . Reading something in the web has become such a nightmare because of this. Imagine yourself reading an article on Silicon Valley’s decadence with your breath held hostage somewhere between your nasal cavity and food-pipe, and the hyperlink taking you here! (Click on the " Silicon Valley " at your own risk, especially if you’re in office)

Epilogue: To see the link dance, run your cursor over the paragraph above and look at your statusbar...

How my salary affected the world order

It was meant to be nothing more than an innocuous prank when I told R that I got the increment letter yesterday, and had a very decent 65% hike( Which was waaay above what one would expect in the normal circumstances). The way the color of his face changed from red to pale to blue, should have given me a warning for the sort of things in store. Ok, here’s the background, he’s leaving the co. and all I wanted was to give him a good shot of adrenalin before he settles down for the mundane. Oh, haven’t you checked lately, the Oxford dictionary has recently revised their definition of mundane. Now it stands like this –

Mundane - mun·dane (m n-d n , m n d n ) adj. a young talented (while in college)
B Tech graduate, now a software engineer, married and (un)settled in Bangalore.

Ok, back to the story. Seeing him undergoing this unbearable pain and neurotic convulsions broke my heart and after a period of 30 minutes of having him in the doldrums, I told him the truth. But the color never really returned to his face. And I thought it was over….

Today:
I was woken up from deep slumber, by the cell-phone ringing. I first thought it was usual 5 o’ clock alarm (which was my way of believing that miracles are still possible with the help of cell-phones), turned it off and went to sleep again. But it won’t stop. So I lifted it, managed to open my eyes and saw that it was Prt. Calling. I accepted the call.

From the other end: “Macha, Good Morning!”

I looked around, yeah its morning, and I am still in my room. “Gloo… (Wiped the drool) Good morning!”

“Pinne what else da macha?”

What’s wrong with this guy? Waking me up in the middle of the night… okay 8:30 in the morning, but what difference does that make? And asking how’s my life progressing from boring to unbearable!! “Dey dey, cut the crap, what’s the matter? Did you ram your car up a truck’s backside or something?”

“No da, heard you got the ‘Ola’ (Mallu jargon for raise-letter)? And a pretty neat raise too, huh? ”

So that’s the matter! Poor soul, tensions are running pretty high in our co. due to this particular white piece of paper. I explained him things and barely managed to convince him and gave him a pep talk (he had begun sobbing, too) and went to look for the newspaper in the courtyard. And started going through the daily motions. I was in the middle of a very pleasing article about unconditional “release” of prisoners in the Guantanamo bay, the phone rang again!

“Hello?”

Baritone from the other side: “Hi, this hand is cold and white ass Can I touch you now Sir? ”

“WHAT?”

“Hi, this is Andy calling from White house, can I talk to you now Sir?”

?!!

“Yes, you can, err, wait a minute”. Sound of flush.

“I may warn you that recording this conversation would be considered offensive and might affect the diplomatic ties between our nations, so can you please turn off that equipment, Sir?”. Duh! With a sense of déjà vu, I turned it off.

“Yes, I have turned it off”. Still trying to adjust to the hyper-reality.

“Sir, we had some extremely reliable sources reporting that you had a recent salary-hike, of about 65% of your current salary. Would you confirm this?”

:-O

“Yes…I mean NO, ….well I guess yes, but what the hell does it have to do with the white house?”

“This is classified, but I can tell you sir, you might just have saved you country from a possible and fatal nuclear fall-out”.

“But how does my salary affect the ties with Pakistan?”

“No, it’s not Pakistan, stupid, it’s the United States!”

“What in the world are you talking about?”

“Don’t you understand the apparent threat software professionals from India is causing to normal civilian life in the United States? Our first option was to work underground, make Indian companies pay more for keeping employees offshore, and stop them flocking to our country. The second option was, nuke your goddammed country of born geeks.”

“But Andy, dear, legislations against outsourcing should have solved your problem…”( On second thoughts) “…though it might affect the Dollar Vs the Euro in the long run…”

“Shut up! It’s not about outsourcing; it’s about your countrymen turning our country into a garbage-bin. First they troubled us with their accents, and then they started questioning our own accent and said what we spoke was not Kween’s Ingleesh. Then they started hanging their underwear upon their front-windows, playing some sort of Indian heavy metal called Bangra through loudspeakers, shouting through their phones in movies and other public places, wearing sandals to formal dinners, offering bribes to cops for escaping speeding tickets, trying to jump in and out of moving trains and getting themselves killed.... they’re everywhere and they're driving us nuts!!! You know what buddy, maybe we should just have nuked the hell out of you.” I heard terse breathing.

I paused for a while. “Ok, cool it, Andy man, count from 1 to 10 and backwards, do you practice Yoga?”

I heard the sound of the phone slamming on the other side. The line went dead.


*****
Courtesy: D,N.

Collage

**Present**

The small raindrops fell all over my body and felt like the tiny scintillating stars that filled a portion of the sky. The sea was roughing up in an intimidating fashion, trying to remind something, trying to scare away the few people who braved the drizzle and the waves, and were either chatting sweet nothings into their palms pressed against their cheeks, or holding someone’s hands and gazing ahead at the eternity that lay before them. The rain was thickening up. I got inside the car. R looked lost in a cloud so far away, sitting in the next seat. Curt Cobain was screaming his heart out, “My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me, tell me where did you sleep last night…”. I saw a flickering flame at one end of the windshield.The hand-cart-vendor who sold Channa was pushing his cart against the wind.

* *Year 1998 * *

We were lying on the floor.
Staring at the ceiling fan, when its leaves cast a magical and kaleidoscopic imagery, in the faint tube-light.
That was the first time I had listened to Nirvana, 2nd year, in college.
“My girl, my girl…” and I felt a quaint uneasiness at the desperation of the voice.
He had explained to me about the grunge movement then.

* *Present * *

The cart reached the middle of the windscreen, and the flame was almost dying out. The man shielded it with his hand. There weren't many customers for him today, but he cant yet afford to go home.

* *Year 2002 * *

The crowds were beginning to disperse in the Juhu beach, and the hapless mules in their century old Marathi décor were calling it a day.
We sat on the edge of the beach, our buttocks occasionally wet by the brown colored seawater which glazed the sand like a mirror.
We were singing different songs, in no particular order or mood, whatever came to our mind.
“In the pines, in the pines where the sun don’t ever shine…”
That was when our voices reached the top of the crescendo and we screamed in delight, watched intently by the moon above.

* *Present * *

The rain had lessened again. The cart reached the other end of the windshield. The flame was still intact. And I think I caught a faint smile on the candle-lit face of the vendor. “I would shiveeeeeeeeeeeeeeer……”. Cobain’s voice died through the 360 Watts speakers behind me. I and R clapped alongwith the equally delirious crowd of the concert.