Friday, May 28, 2010

Confessions and Confusions of a Narcissist !!!

Why do we say TGIF?? Why thanking only God? We should also thank Satan and all the creature in Hell Heaven and Earth, Horatio! With the dull Friday afternoon quickly coming to and end, another Week-end is approaching .. While for you, this weekend is another insignificant one in the march of many such other weekends, for me it's kinda special . You see , it's the last weekend of the 20th year of my nascent life. Now, I am the kind of person who loves to celebrate her birthday.. I am sure even when i'll turn 90 , I'd expect all my friends to arrange for a grand big cake for me and even if i suffer from diabetes mellitus and haven't left with a single teeth , I'd surely find out some ways to smuggle some portion of it inside my mouth!


Anyway , as i was saying , this week end is a bit special for me and thus I have no intention of spending it sleeping at my room , watching movies or brooding at some gothic looking bridge on the river Mutha. Whatever I do this weekend has to have a legendary flavour about it... But i dont wanna plan anything , cause my system has some rivalry with anything which is , well, systematic ! Thus, I'll start thinking about it only after Midnight ... May be , I'd just go to the station and be on board  a train w/o having any idea regarding where it goes to! But then even though it sounds interesting , somehow it ranks way beneath the legendary category : to be in that one, I need to come up with something insanely intriguing... I wish I just could go to the Pacific and swim with the dolphins where the water is as deep as forever.. But on the other hand i am not sure whether there is any dolphin in the pacific , especially post the BP oil leak ... And also it'd be prudent to come up with a more economic solution... I've already been invited to a friend's place this saturday to freak out and party all night ... But then, I met her only in the previous week in the parikrama concert I wrote about and thus I surmise I might trespass into her gregariousness if i accept her invitation .. but then i never thought much b4 doing something thus I might go but i dont want to ... Even if I end up doing the ordinary things this week-end, I wanna do them in an extra ordinary circumstances , ie even if i want to have a all night movie marathon , I just want it to be arranged in a spooky 17th century house instead of a normal modern day cage like flats... But enough blabbering about non existent plans.


Let me now tell me about a caprice of mine which led me to an Archies Gallery.  But before that I shamefully admit that I was again feeling low yesterday... I was missing my mom and yet when i called her , i could not articulate my feelings and the frustration thus generated bred into an altercation ... And after a long stretch of wandering alone underneath the Deccan Bridge ,  I was approached by a Lady and the conversation with her and her 2 kids was  a salvation for my soul.. Even though she talked to me in Marathi and I replied in English and my reply most probably didn't match her questions , I felt awfully good  about the mere flow of words with another human being despite the fact that she was a complete stranger. Next , I went to Cafe Good luck which being overcrowded, I consumed some pasta salad salad(which followed by a grand meal KFC an hour later, I must control my glutton in some way!)   in a cosy nice roadside cafe and while walking aimlessly in the road (as usual) , glanced upon this Archies Store and I immediately knew I needed to buy some cards... Now, some of you might argue against my predilection towards greeting cards.. "After all how can a mass produced line written by a stranger can be used as a greeting to some1 special ?" you'd say. You are right and maybe that's the reason why traditional cards are fighting a losing battle against customised ones (or even SMSes  !!!)  but yet sometimes we do feel like being subjugated by the bourgeois norms of the society. Thus I went inside the shop and searched for a card for my special one. Now, there were specially made cards for almost everyone: nephew, niece, brother, uncle, husband , wife , mom , dad, all the pet species starting from dog & fish to boyfriend , girlfriend &  fiancée and YET ; they somehow astoundingly forgot or ignored to keep / make cards for the most special person of any living soul's life. Yes . I am talking about the lack of cards you can dedicate to yourself . Why can't there be any cards like :" Dear ME, wish u a very happy 21st birthday !".. Why narcissism till now remains a rather tabooed trait in our society while most of us have our own share of it? Or are we too afraid to admit that we love ourselves in the fear of being considered as some poor lonely souls admired and loved by no1 else ! Isn't it the other way round? Doesn't  life become even more brighter for us when we learn to depend on ourselves ?




So, that's the food for thought for your week-end and with this I'd sign off for now .. Hopefully there'd be another post before I turn 21!


PS: I finally bought a normal 21st birthday wish kind of card ,,, will upload the snaps of it in this space once I've gifted it to myself adding a personal note underneath all the babbling written inside it!

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Some Gibberish

Haven't written anything for quite a long time;  wouldn't have even written anything 2day hadn't one of my friends enquired about my blog...  Many news are pending from my side, including my Pune sightseeing which included tour to Parvati Temple & Chatursinghi Temple ; both of which are situated on top of hills and while exploring the 2nd one I actually climbed up the hill wearing a stiletto and I must admit it was heck of a task!!!  Then on this Sunday, post the chaturshinghi tour , I visited Shaniwarvada and simply hated the place. . . However , the Laxmi road tour followed by it was  quite interesting but all these are nothing compared to the monsoon of madness which flooded away my sanity on this Saturday. 


On Friday night , Manpreet gave me a lift at good-luck cafe and after she was gone, I was roaming around like a lost soul in the streets and a most miraculous thing happened . Some people probably took pity on me and handed over a concert ticket for Mtv Stuntmania Rockathon where the rock band named Parikrama was supposed to perform. So, Next day I went office at around 11.30 am (my reporting time is 9.30am ) and left for lunch at 1pm and after coming back went directly to the director's room to ask for an early leave.. Frankly speaking, i'd not have even done that hadn't my other sincere colleagues looked so scandalized at the mere thought of me eloping with my caprice w/o informing any1! The directer obviously  looked thunder struck when i informed me about the concert ( I could have come up with some other excuses but i was simply sick of all these insignificant lies) , and he said in an ominous voice :" Do as u wish." Now I interpreted that as :" Yes sure, you can leave" ( Afterall your job is just a mean to sustain in life .. What's the point of a job when is the "life" itself is missing from ur life?!) and I left immediately and for the 1st time met one gregarious Puneite. I merely asked this lady for the direction of Katraj and she actually gave me  a lift there. In the way we had  a rather amusing discussion about the matching sunshine of me and her 11 months old son and I must confess I never knew so much about my zodiac characteristics as I came to know from her in only 20 mins. And after reaching the venue I had this irresistible urge to embarrass myself and thus actually I got up in the stage in front of some 500 + boys and girls and danced with the tune of Akon. Then , four local rock bands came and made us write a paper on patience before finally Parikrama came on stage at around 8.30 pm (oh BTW, I'd reached there by 3 pm!)... I still wonder why they considered Led Zeppelin as the greatest psychedelic rock band ever , but the fusion that followed this statement was really awesome . I came back around 11.30 and when my land-lady asked the reasons for being late , I simply pointed out that the night was still young and left her dumbstruck.




Well enough of information .. Let's discuss some insights now. My life in pune has been a weird combination of emotional troughs& crests... I hate my job: My nature is that if i get frustrated with something , it becomes impossible for me to concentrate on that ... & i simply hate the method with which I've been asked to approach the project .. I simply hate the PG and the body-odour of my roommates. If I had to choose between a dumb brute and another who smells bad I'd probably chose the former. But I don't have much of  achoice . Coz , my room mates carry both these qualities! So, I basically run away from the PG in the morning and stay out as late as possible and sometimes I feel terribly lonely and then I become angry with myself for not being able to be self contained...  But then in some moments I feel so happy with my life, like for example in the concert, i felt like i was in the top of the world. I never really got much chances to be a normal 20 years old. In my home , I was surrounded by people far older than me. When i was 5, my best friend was a 17 year old young lady . Thus I grew up to be a rather precocious child. But on saturday night i just felt like shedding all that burden of maturity off and just indulge in the sheer spirit of youth and its insane enthusiasm . And i loved to be around people whom I'd hang out with in normal scenario ! It feels good if u just realize how young you are. You suddenly see a whole lot of possibility lying in front u. Remeber the famous dialogue from Shirley Valentine? "From now on whenever i'd look at the mirror , I'd never say : Oh God.. I am 45; instead I'd say : Oh Shirley , you are ONLY 45!"  


So, when i was standing at Deccan bus stop yesterday I did some really lght hearted thinking about my life. And I discovered that I can claim to have some dexterity in sketching , singing and even though I can never express what i actually think, I can at least give it a try. And I love listening to music , reading , swimming and contemplating . That leaves me with a world full of things I am either NOT good at or have not learnt to love. What's the point of wasting time in brooding over some incidents or some persons when u've so much to do with the limited time you have in hand. So, from now on whenever I feel like brooding , I'd rather do something crazy , this world is in dire need of some sincere madness and I'll try my best to provide my share :)




PS. I discovered the kingdom of Narnia at the backside of my PG. On sunday morn at around 5, I got too bugged with the cackling and racket of my room mates and thus I got out of the bed, put on my sneakers and hit the road w/o even bothering to brush my teeth or change my night suit! There is this slum in the backyard of our PG and it's located in a small hill (not exactly a hill but well, one might say that the slope of the place was a bit higher than the normal slop of plains) , I've no idea what whim drove me there but i went inside and after reaching the other side of the slum, I discovered a wonder land called Vetal hills (I didn't knew the name then though, i found it later from google maps !) which is far better than any of the conventional tourist spots simply by virtue of being unexplored by the hoi polloi and thus it is still now unscathed of the bane of  pollution and plastics. From now on whenever i'd feel like taking a short escape I know a wonderland which is just 18 mins away from the stinking PG of mine... So, in the end I guess all those room mates of mine whom i hate so much deserve a gregarious thanks from me. Hadn't it been for them, I'd never discover that secret wardrobe :) 

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Business of Life

Doesn't it seem like a dream job? 3.50 in the afternoon and I've nothing to do but to listen to music and write blogs .. I listened to hard rocks in YouTube throughout the pre lunch hours and now have decided to try a different platter: Blues. I love this woman : Norah , I mean .. It mesmerizes me how easily she expresses deepest of feelings . But I'd talk about music some other day . Today I've something else to talk about... Hold your breath girls and boys, women and men , humans and other animals, living and the deceased : cause, for the 1st time in my blog-life I m gonna talk about business. In my own sweet (!) way of course.




1st Scenario :
Location:- Jockey Outlet , MIT
Time:-8.45 pm , Tuesday
I went with my room-mate to help her buy a pair of jogging track-pants. I had no bloody idea which kind of help she was expecting from me and why on the 1st place she was buying one while she'd never go for jogging for sure but then again, I had nothing to do and besides; being a woman , I've an intrinsic knack towards shopping (or rather window shopping) so I accompanied her. Now, like any ignorant consumer, i was under the impression that store assistants are there only to assist , but clearly, in this store they were behaving like the Gestapo ! The key word in lingerie shopping is perhaps "Privacy", at least it is so in India . I don’t know about my room-mate but i clearly was feeling a bit uneasy when one of the shop ladies was literally breathing over my shoulder. But that at least was tolerable and can be blamed to their inability of trusting the power of CCTVs. But what the other lady did to my roommate was not only disgusting but also outright insulting ; when my room-mate had chosen a particular pair and wanted to try it out , she was told : "Ma'am (and that was pronounced as gum) , it wont suit you at all." And when even after that she was determined to try it out, the lady actually kept on insisting her to buy a large size when she was looking for medium and said ominously : " you might try out the medium size but It'd look really bad"! I was amazed at the will power of my roommate. I get easily instigated by even tiniest of trespassing in my privacy and i'd have probably sued the shop if i were at the receiving end of such comments, but my roommate actually chose to neglect them and bought not only the track pant but many other items much to the apparent dismay of the shop lady. Now, I had carefully chosen the word apparent . After all, all these shop attendants work in commission basis thus their interest is to make the browsing turn into shopping . Thus, the means taken doesn't matter at all. May be, the lady in that shop was a brilliant reader of consumer psyche and by neglecting all the CRM lessons of Kotler and other numerous marketing books she stood out to be a purple cow. Promoting sales by irking the consumer ? challenging them to try out things? You decide! I, in the meantime , will find out some other jockey showroom where the shop people wont turn out to be such as***les.


2nd Scenario:-
Location :- An insignificant nameless Beauty Parlor near MIT
Time:- 4.30 pm, Tuesday
Turn on any channel on your idiot box and the maximum number of personal care ads you'll come across will try to entice you to invest on the beatification of your face. Now I personally feel that my feet and not my face deserves maximum amount of my attention (Not that I give it what it deserves but then that is the story of my life, i preach things without practicing them). So, it's pretty natural that when i finally managed to get some time for myself yesterday(ie when i finally managed to move my lazy butt) , the 1st thing I decided to do was to get a Pedicure. I love to indulge into reading a delicious love story when someone else is pampering my feet. After all , at some point of our life , we all do like to be treated as princesses and not just another nameless entity in the hoi polloi being stampeded by boots and not even receiving any gesture of apology. Thus a fairy tale romance can only be appreciated in a such a scenario when the aroma of lavender pack and the titillating touch of rose petals veils the big bad world from your vision and creates the illusion of a land of happily ever after. However, in my case it was a pretty basic pedicure (ie w/o the rose petal and stuff) and actually i got a small cut in the process. Now, I am quite sturdy and not the kind who faints at the sign of RBC, but since i was paying for a service , i deliberately acted hypochondriac and ended up getting a 60% discount and a free massage. Now, the story ends here but there's an epilogue which is more important . Today , in the morning , i received a small sms which expressed concern about my cut (it was actually a scratch) and wished a quick recovery . So, they actually made use of my phone number and they didn't take it just for the heck of taking it. Result?  if I ever feel the necessity of going to parlor again within these 6 weeks , I'd definitely choose this place and moreover I almost did a free WOM (WOT?) publicity of the place before i decided to hide the name of the place. Moral of the story ? Pampering works for me






3rd Scenario:-
Location :- Roll Club near MIT
Time:- 10.30 pm, Tuesday
For all you Bengalis out there (or anyone with an entrepreneurial bend of mind) here's a man who can be your inspiration. This person started his career in Nizam , climbed up the career ladder and became the GM of some restaurant and then one fine day just quit his job to open this small fast food corner with his wife as the chief chef. Now, he sells egg rolls at Rs 45/ piece and though I don't have any idea how much money he is making after paying 18000Rs rent pm for that tiny place; his life is far better than the post VRS average Indian men's lives which mainly consist of watching cricket matches and criticizing the players...!


I'd wrap up with a rather sad news from my PG life. I tried washing my clothes yesterday . I.e. I dipped them in warm water and detergent at 7 pm and after coming back at around 11, I almost got a stroke. The water had disappeared from the bucket and instead the clothes were dipped in blood. Most of them died or got severely injured by then and even after ventilation and saline doses, I could not save them . Then I discovered the culprit who caused the blood-bath. It was the Hare Krishna T-Shirt my mom bought as a gift for me from Vrindavan, the ISKCON premises to be precise. The man (And I am talking about Chaitanya Mahaprabhu here) who preached non-violence throughout his life, ironically got associated with a massacre , courtesy me!

Monday, May 17, 2010

My Weekend!

Since I've logged into gtalk today at approx 10am, I've been asked a single question by around 20 friends of mine. The question is : " How was your weekend?"



So, this my humble endeavor of articulating my longest weekend ever in the past 1 year;) . My Saturday morning started at 12.30 pm when, after waking up , i felt too exhausted too go outside in search of food and so , in order to deviate my thoughts away from the thought of it, i watched a medley of scenes from my favorite movies. And then I went out at around 6.30 and sat near the bus stop till 10.30 pm and called my old friends (ie , rang them for approximately 23 seconds and intimated them of my lack of balance so that they were obliged to call me back and once they did that , I showed no sign of hanging up the calls before at least an hour. Call me a parsimonious prick but trust me, if you're stuck in an alien parish and you're witnessing ur darling Saturday night getting brutally raped by a monster called depression , that's the best way you can try to save her.


I did some photo shoot with my roommates after coming back. I mean I literally wanted to shoot them but changed my intention in the last moment when one of my room mate's sister came to spend her vacation here. That 19 year old beauty immediately reminded me of my childhood dream of looking like Halle Berry : u know, the tall, dark, handsome kind. She was 5' 9'' , as beautifully mysterious as night itself and had killer legs. Now, don't get me wrong . I don't consider myself a member of the pink club (though i am an ardent supporter of it) but I feel like appreciating beauty when i behold it. Especially in a country such as ours, where dusky is synonymous to disgusting , I strongly believe that singing the eulogy of such beauties is my moral obligation!


Sunday morn was almost same as that of its predecessor , I left my couch at around 5.30 pm and then got up in a bus to swargate with an intention of getting down at swargate but after a telephonic conversation with Nikhil changed my mind and went to a place called saras garden. Sometimes I really feel surprised when i ponder upon the paradigm shift in my psyche post my adolescence. As a kid, I used to hate crowd , even in my early teens I felt like bringing a machine gun and obliterating all those in front of me , whenever I had to stand in a queue in a railway station. I saw the lice in their hair and the plaque in their teeth and almost sympathized with Hitler. But now all these things literally turn me on. I love the vibration of life which overflows in the atmosphere when I go to a place such as the one I had been on yesterday. Saras garden is a temple (I guess so, they were selling flowers, garlands and diyas in the entrance) enclosed by a garden. And immediately outside the entrance, there's this street fair which can be seen in no other place but India, only our country can offer such an attractive synchronization amongst apparently appalling pandemonium. Since I've come to Pune, I've noticed the Puneites' predilection towards fairs. I guess this is a trait of most of the Indian small towns. I am not sure what's the reason . Maybe it is the lack of other means of entertainment or just aversion towards shelling out big bucks for a night out in multiplexes or night clubs. Alternatively the average Indian middle class hoi polloi can probably still not morally accept the night club/ pub culture, not at least as a family destination.


But again, I am deviating from my narrative. I was determined to feel great yesterday and thus I sported a big grin throughout the evening. It's funny how you can bemuse, confuse or even offend people just by projecting an aura of contentment. "How come is she smiling when the world is accelerating towards hell?" : that was the general impression in people's face. Some even looked skeptic : " What wrong with me? Am I wearing the shirt inside out? or else why is she smiling at me?" ! One even approached me with the disgusting blunt question of : " do u wanna be my friend?" I wonder why they use such tacky one liner euphemisms when their intention is completely different but then, even the high profile recruiters do teh same. "Why did you pursue MBA after graduation?" -- " Obviously because otherwise I wont get any job you moron !" ... But you can never say that an you come up with beautiful lies. However, post that crappy question , I burst out into manic laughter and that poor man literally ran for his life being convinced that I've probably absconded from Yerwada( that's where the central prison as well as mental asylum of pune is located in)... ! Finally when I managed to reach that place at around 7, I looked up in the sky and noticed a most amazing sight. A bright star was dating the svelte moon of Akshay Tritia. I called a friend to get confirmed that that star was actually planet Venus and I called my mom who was apparently trying to call me up in the same moment seeing the same celestrial vision. Telepathy? You decide. There was a perfect symphony between the nature and us human beings. I could feel the magic in the air which was waving music out of all the cacophony. And I felt less like the name printed on my passport and more like myself, after a long time I was having a perfect date with the girl who used to be me. And then my phone rang: It was Rajesh . The poor fellow was just out of police station, lodging a complaint about his missing, rather stolen purse which contained his ATM, debit and credit cards and 1500 bucks! I felt bad for him and the entire magical atmosphere which was around me shattered like a glassball and I couldn't create the original structure again from the broken pieces. Thus I took an Auto, went to F C Road, had a scrumptiously sumptuous dinner consisting of CAD B, Chicken Lollypop , Ice Cream and Cold Coffee (honestly I had them all !) and went back to my PG at around 11.


So that's the story of my weekend, now tell me : How was yours ?!


Friday, May 14, 2010

Namesake!

1st of all let me tell you guys that yesterday's evening was the 1st instance when I had a real rocking time with friends here at Pune. I went out to F C Road with 2 colleagues of mine, Manpreet and Karan . The former one actually dumped her accounts class for us. And we had good food , crazy chit chats( one instance of which was Karan's story of serving 'pee'psi to his roommate) and a real good time which ended @ 10.30 pm with Manpreet telling us about her encounter with the immaterial (she actually spent a night with a ghost.. pity that the ghost was an old man or else it could be the beginning of a real 'paheli' type romance) followed by me taking an auto whose driver was totally sloshed and refused to stop at MIT!


I could go on writing the entire blog on yesterday but I have something far more interesting to write about. It is said that every person on earth has this natural instinct of searching her name in Wikipedia. I wonder why I've not done it before! Actually I wouldn't have done it even now hadn't I searched the meaning of the name of a friend's fiancée. Once I found out the meaning of her name (which basically was "daughter of the mountain), I felt like searching for that of mine. And I came across an extra-ordinarily weird entry in Wikipedia. I actually used to rule a mythical kingdom in era in some 5th century BC!!!!


Now let's do a comparative study between me and my syno'nym' (now, what's the word for 'persons having same name'? forgive my momentary amnesia) and find out how the later affected / influenced the former.


• This person was a man which accounts for the male persona which catches hold of my psyche from time to time.
• From Wikipedia: "King Suchandra (Tib. Dawa Sangpo) of the northeastern Indian Kingdom of Shambhala was the one who requested teaching from the Buddha that would allow him to practice the dharma without renouncing his worldly enjoyments and responsibilities." No wonder I always keep on chucking hard work for some smarter solutions through shorter and less perilous routes.
• He established "Kalchakra (The wheel of Time) Practices and wrote a 60,000 lines long commentary describing it. The main aim of this practice was to evade the grinding machine of time. I've done the same by just choosing to ignore the neon sign hanging over my head that:" Time is running out". If u choose not to care, nothing can intimidate you, r8? Thus I don't need to write notes or create 3D sculptures. My life itself is a live 3D note right in front of ur eyes which preaches ways to avoid being smashed by the 4th dimension.
• By practicing Kalachakra, the province of shambhala became an enlightened society with suchandra as their ruler. Thus, he virtually created an Atlantis: Even I've and please don't ask how or where. If u knew the location of Atlantis then it'd no more remain a mystery to you.
• Besides, that I've "enlightened" you guys are evident from the very fact that u never part with your fast track / ray ban glares even at 2am in the morning. After all, the blaze of your own enlightenment is too much for yourselves to bear with!
• King Suchandra is said to be the emanation of Vajrapani (One who carries Thunderbolt in Hand): No wonder all my electronic gadgets get spoiled so quickly: it is the static energy of my hand that writes their epitaph!


So, isn't it amazing how much insight you can get about yourself just with the click of your mouse? I wish I could get insights about MSMEs (Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises) as easily as that. That's what my project is all about: identifying TG for my company amongst them. Didn't I tell you that before? Oh! I am sure I have but that information must have got lost in translation somewhere in the way. After all it's a long way from 5th century BC Tibet to 2010 AD Pune, u see!!!

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Lapis lazuli

Just finished eating a spring dosa from Abhisek's: d eating joint near this tiny place where i m wasting 2 precious months of my life. I never tried spring dosa before and thought that I'd like it coz i like spring rolls. BUT, I absolutely HATED it .. the taste of cabbage is still intact in my palate and it tastes like my life in this godforsaken place. BLAND...completely bland. I first blamed my depression on my hormonal misbalance due to PMS. But that for sure is not the cause. The factor causing this is actually the joke of a 'job' i am currently associated with and the horrible dungeon where i m staying at. The very air of that place can kill any living being. Take for example the bunch of roses I bought yesterday. As long as I was outside the PG, they was looking resplendent and I swear they were smiling and laughing at each others personal jokes. But the moment I entered the PG, all these changed. Their merry voices broke into desperate screams . . .The way the hapless Jews used to scream while they entered the gas chamber. It made my blood cold. I tried my best to save them : I sprayed water on them , kept them near the window to save them from the toxic air of that room. But nothing worked. All those these roses who were living so peacefully till now started a skirmish so violent that i could see hints of red blood in the petals of yellow rose buds. By the time the clock strike mid night , all these flowers were dead. killed by the evil air of my pg which led them to cannibalize each other.

 
I felt terribly fidgety and frightened. I was so happy before i came here. I dont want to die. But if that room takes less than two hours to kill innocent bunch of roses, how long will it take to finish me? And it has already started nibbling my conscience. I can feel it. I want to stay away from it as long as possible. But when night brakes into the city and no one but dogs and human canines are left in the street to greet me , I must go back to that PG and wait for my doom.


I wish I could go back to woodstock and swim in the pool. That's the only bezoar which can save me now. Swimming. When a friend of mine told me about his regular regime of swimming after the office hours, I almost turned green in envy. I need my pool now. I feel wonderful when i am floating aimlessly and serenely in the water. I feel secure. I feel like all the dimensions of time and space are lost and i've turned into a featus, as nascent and as ancient as the rising sun, floating in the assurance of her mother's amniotic fluid. But it never feels claustrophobic. It feels like the universe itself. I get freed from the bondage of my mortal body and i spread over the entire universe and beyond. I need to feel that way now. All these blood of my vein were not created to feed some evil PG. I know venom has spread in my blood from the sting of that monstrous room but I've to purify it somehow. I've come all these way. I can't afford to give up now!

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Remembering the Rembrandts

I never had to face so much touble in deciding how to kill time. The evenings are egregiously big here. Sun never sets before 7.20 and I am having a kinda Al Pacino de la 'insomnia' syndrome while coping up with the changed schedule. I drink numerous cups of coffee/ tea in office, do nothing throughout the day except for reading movie quotes in imdb and waiting breathlessly for the watch to strike 6.30 and when it actually does, i am ecstatic for a moment or two before realizing the gruesome fact that : I'VE NOTHING TO DO. Take for instance yesterday. I started for my PG with Karan (who's my Welingkarite colleague here) but on the way I felt like i m marching towards my doom and thus I took his leave, left the main road for an insignificant boulevard and started walking aimlessly wondering how the story of my entire life is getting a materialistic reflection in my days here. Talking to my mom generally helps but her suggestion of attending "art of life" (which i refer to adding an extra f ) did nothing but making me even more insane. Thus I got into a bus and when i got down in swargate (which is one of the most important bus-stops here) , I felt like I've been time lifted to 1940s as the ghostly buildings , with their lights being turned off at 7.45 pm , looked like they are anticipating a Japanese bomb attack . And the entire atmosphere was stuffy and almost smelled like gun powder and it somehow clouded my vision. For the next 1 and a half hour I walked all the way to Pune Railway Station and even though I tried to encourage myself by uttering many a movie quotes and humming death metals ; that couldn't save me from embarrassing myself in public and all I could remember was the Friend's title track and suddenly i realized far from creating love or affection : distance ruins all emotions. Thus none of my old friends are now as close as they used to be when we used to kill our time together in nandan or mohar kunja with endless crazy discussions and observations. Talks over phn or voice chats can never replace those days. The fact that i could not contact my ex-best good friend even aggravated my vulnerability. And then i realized that this is the 1st time in my life that i m totally alone and on my own. When i stayed in B'lore some friends were always there. And when most of them went home in Diwali , I was suffering from the same kind of emotional asphyxiation. Thus at the end of the day, I guess i just need some Homo Sapiense. Doesn't mater if they understand me or not , if they care to listen to me or not : even if they are actually mere primates in the body of  human beings ; I feel better when i am surrounded by some people who are at least my acquaintances. As Mr Donne said : "No man is an island". But then it's not that I always crave for company of people i know. Generally, I am a talking machine and I never faced problem in starting discussions with even complete strangers. But yesterday was one of the emotional 'bad hair day' of my life: a day where no hair gel or innovative hairstyle can arrange ur messy mane. I jsut hope my 2months' stay here wont be replete with such days. Or else, i'd surely go insane!!!

Monday, May 10, 2010

Weekend News & Views

I won't say I was eagerly waiting for this weekend to come. No, if I said that, it'd be a lie. Actually after the end of my 1st 'in job week’, I was dying for the 1st weekend to come. I was rather devastated to know that it had been postponed for 1 day, thanks to the preposterous culture of ”alternate Saturday off" and previous Saturday being the wrong one in the series.






So, finally when I woke up at 4 am on my blissful Sunday morning (It looked nothing like a morning though, it was pitch black outside)... I was all set to go and surprise my Mumbaikar friends... but then post brushing my teeth, the very familiar and dear friend Mr. Lethargy came to visit me and thus till 1 pm, I laid half awake in my tiny hybrid cot and watched endless marching of Fellini's creations which, however intriguing they might be, were not at all suitable for a bright Monday morning. So, I finally decided to move my horrendously over weight butt and after doing a few shopping here and there (including buying a pair of glares, the heat was killing me), came back to my PG took a bath at 5.30 pm (considering the fact that I planned to take it at 4.30 am; I was merely an hour late with just a tweaking in the very next letter which comes after the numbers!).. Oh! I also went to Durga cafe during this trip but then the detailed discussion will follow later.



Anyway, I aimlessly proceeded to the bus stop and with the aim of exploring the city got into the 1st bust that was passing by. It was incidentally going to swargate but I got down at Deccan (for those who are not familiar with Pune: it is a big drain with a couple of bridges on it trying to give the general public the illusion of it being a river). I've no idea why I did that but while walking aimlessly on the bridge; I glanced on a merry-go-round and was immediately busy finding a way towards it. But the lanes of Pune can be really confusing. Thankfully I met 2 girls named Amruta and Madhuri who were also going there and befriended them and had a rocking time till 8pm (will upload the pics soon @ FB )



Then, I came back at MIT and for the 2nd time of the day and the place which failed to impressed me in the blazing sunlight, completely bamboozled me in the night. Man, they should write case studies on that place. Apart from their egregiously low priced cold coffee, their entire SCM is awesome. I doubt if Mc Donald can ever boast of such precision and besides unlike big Mac, this place has a personality of it's not the (lack of) mere plastic smile of robot like waiters. Besides, this cafe is one of those very few places where u can see, smell and feel the real India: across all ages, cultures & SECs, be it a low cut Levi Strauss clad youth with spiked hair or long braided traditional middle aged lady wearing conservative salwar.



In fact, more will follow on Durga Cafe from me (wonder why no substantial article is written on it except for a few brief reviews!) and for those people who are from Kolkata or has been there: this Cafe will invariably remind you of coffee house even though they are strangely dissimilar.



That's all from me for 2day. Watch out this place for further updates. Ciao :)

Friday, May 7, 2010

1st Post in a new city

I probably didn't mention in my previous posts that I was supposed to come to pune. I came here for my summer internship on the day after Maharashtra day and went directly to my PG in paud road which was no less beautiful than warshaw ghetto and the inhabitants reminded me of the latest Martin Scorcese flick 'Shutter Island' !! the only good thing abt the PG is the hammock but then thanks to my roomates and PG mates , i seldom get a chance to take a swing. Ces't la vie. At least on a positive not , my next year at woodstock will be a bliss for me post this PG experience and the 1st thing i'd do after getting back to B'lore is to nominate Priya for the 'best roomie grammy awards"!

Now abt the city: it's a small place surrounded by hills ..Even the so called grown up people here has miraculously retained their biggest childhood virtue namely curiousness ... Thus sinse I've landed up here, I always found at least 8 pair of eyes(i've 4 roommates, remember?) gauging every action of mine (except inside the water closet, hopefully they've not installed a spycam or something) even if it is as trivial as reading newspaper.

I found the omnipresense of lord Ganesha everywhere to be pretty awe inspiring .. May be it were convenient when Pune was an isolated , mainly army dominated interbun but with the ever expanding population and ever shrinking living space , the inhabitants of this place should have converted their reverense to a God who were less corpulent than Ganesha. It's so damn unfair that when I am paying bloody 2000Rs pm for a cot in a virtually railway waiting hall, some devine entity is not only njoying thousands of residents throughout the city, but also getting paid by lugubrious ammount of 'chillar'.


My office as of now turned out to be a cool place ...in fact that is ,as of now, my most favourite place in pune. A talk with the directer yesterday confirmed what I surmised from the info available in their website... This office has  a typical ENTP personality.. high on ideation and low on implementation.. And I ,eing a 0% completer / implementer , am finding it too be perfectly well suited for me. In one sentense: my project involves evaluating why MSMEs are aversive to take advantage of design implementation and suggest strategies which will  open up the foodgate  of  MSME investment for this company. The staff here are fun loving and cool. With music being played in the PCs throughout the day and my work being mostly involved with reading , I find this place to be more like Landmark than an office... But the soul problem is I dont think i'd get any practical exposure from here... Must find some way out in being buried underneath the pile of bookish knowledge.. It is too early to comment on some of the weird entities I've encountered here. To get updated about them u must wait for my next blog.. And with me having almost no work to do here, that wait wont be a long one :)