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Showing posts from January, 2006

How blind we become...

The chair was comfortable. Very comfortable. Perhaps this is the only time I’ll be able to appreciate it. I looked at the floor. A few fluorescent lamps glistened on its mopped luster. I registered all the shapes, the angles, and the symmetries and asymmetries of the lounge. I will never see this place like this again. I will become one among the people hurrying past, never having to bother to appreciate the room and its features. I felt like that person in a music video I had seen, standing still while everybody hurried past. The room and myself, still, and conversing to each other, without making a sound. It is three years since I had done a similar thing. Another place, another office, similar situation. Then I so comfortably slipped into the role of the passer-by. Often trying hard not to notice the people waiting in the chairs. Familiarity makes you take things so much for granted, that you fail to notice them. Only until the moment comes, when you stand to lose them. Then the sha

Visuals...

This is how I spent the weekend...

laundry service?

Image
Welcome to the armpit of India. Alang, where end-of-life ships from the First World come to die. Beached along the coastline like dozens of decomposing whales, the carcasses of ships are dismantled, disemboweled and dismembered until not even a bolt remains.This is a place that progress purposely forgot, but conveniently remembered when it needed to defecate. No high-tech machinery here, no Makita drills and no Hitachi cranes, just 40,000 migrant labourers working in subhuman conditions, scantily-clad, unprotected, bare-footed, scrabbling with their bare hands to meet the steel mafia's quota and earn a miminum wage. Scurrying like ants on fresh road-kill, workers haul miles of cable out to burn on the beach, use blowtorches to cut through pipes containing oil and gas that often explode in their faces, and expose themselves to hundreds of debilitating chemicals that surround them 24 hours a day. Read more... Just what do we think we're doing? How long will the invertebraete GoI

Pictures...

Here r the pics , from last weekend's trip

On a good note....

00:00 AM, 1st January. That’s the time when everyone is throwing themselves around (or up, depending upon how much you’ve consumed) and hugging each other and kissing each other and wishing each other and all that. That’s a moment when everyone loves everyone else and greets everyone else with their best smiles and …. Scree…eeech!! My altruistic New Year vision comes to a sliding halt! “Shut your bloody mouths and get your dirty asses inside, or I will beat the shit out of you bastards!!!!” That’s what we got. Those were the first words spoken to us in 2006. Or the Malayalam equivalent of it. Which sounds slightly worse. And thank God, we were still on the right side of alcohol intoxication, and the testosterone levels were kept under check with a small effort, and our brains seemed to have registered a few facts – 1. Unfamiliar territory 2. Armed, more powerful opponents 3. Bad light conditions… 4. Possibility of more forces joining the ranks What the heck, we were just a bunch of dru