Can you lie and get away?

Are you a good liar? Most people think that they are, but in reality there are big differences in how well we can pull the wool over the eyes of others. There is a very simple test that can help determine your ability to lie. Using the first finger of your dominant hand, draw a capital letter Q on your forehead.

Some people draw the letter Q in such a way that they themselves can read it. That is, they place the tail of the Q on the right-hand side of their forehead. Other people draw the letter in a way that can be read by someone facing them, with the tail of the Q on the left side of their forehead. This quick test provides a rough measure of a concept known as "self-monitoring". High self-monitors tend to draw the letter Q in a way in which it could be seen by someone facing them. Low self-monitors tend to draw the letter Q in a way in which it could be read by themselves.

High self-monitors tend to be concerned with how other people see them. They are happy being the centre of attention, can easily adapt their behaviour to suit the situation in which they find themselves, and are skilled at manipulating the way in which others see them. As a result, they tend to be good at lying. In contrast, low self-monitors come across as being the "same person" in different situations. Their behaviour is guided more by their inner feelings and values, and they are less aware of their impact on those around them. They also tend to lie less in life, and so not be so skilled at deceit.

Read more.

Needless, to say I am adept at the art of deception. Does anyone, reading this, actually picture drawing the imaginary ‘Q’ with the tail on the right of their forehead? Please let me know, I am curious.

If there are no comments, I will assume most people I deal with in regular life are all capable of slipping something right below my nose, anytime.

Grinderman ..... Grinds!

Nick Cave says, “A man without a moustache is like a woman with one”. SMITians, I am pretty sure, will know what this means, atleast a handful of them, the observative and talkative kind!

The new Grinderman(2007) album, featuring 57 years old punk rocker Nick Cave and his fellow Bad Seeds, is kick-ass! I didn’t get hooked on to it at first attempt but after one week of rewind it has left more than just an impression. As Memphis Slim put it back in 1941, "While everything is quiet and easy Mr. Grinder can have his way..."

The album kicks off on the right note with the mighty roar of “Get It On”, a song with a lot of intent, the lament of rock hero who defied evolution, drank panther piss, dug his pornographic crown and even fucked the girls you are married to. Mice, dogs, baboons and hyenas, the enemies of inspiration all assume animal shapes in this song. Vocals with words of wisdom backed with fussed out guitar, persistent cymbals and a thick gut throbbing bass line make this song hiss like a rattlesnake.

The next song, ‘No Pussy Blues’, with its type-writer intro loop morphing into high hats is the thick coat of sleaze on this sexually frustrated plum cake of desperate romantic overtures. Badass, punk/goth mayhem with a capital ‘B’. Cave says it is like the child standing goggle-eyes at the cake shop window, as the shop owner, in his plastic sleeves, barricades the doors and turns the sign to ‘CLOSED’. The orgasmic wah rips apart the initial tempo which is set by overtly frustrated Cave in the opening minute on the song. The video itself is enough for loopy eyed juveniles, getting no pussy, to dig this album and get tuned in. Hiss! Hiss! Rattle and shake.

My face is finished, my body's gone
And I can't help but think standin' up here in all

this applause and gazin' down at all the young and the beautiful
with their questioning eyes
that I must above all things love myself
that I must above all things love myself
that I must above all things love myself

I saw a girl in the crowd
I ran over I shouted out
I asked if I could take her out
but she said that she didn't want to

I changed the sheets on my bed
I combed my hair across my head
I sucked in my gut and still she said
that she just didn't want to

I read her Elliot and I read her Yeats
I tried my best to stay up late
I fixed the hinges on her gate
but still she just never wanted to

I bought her a dozen snow white doves
I did her dishes in rubber gloves
I called her honey bee, I called her love
but she just still didn't want to
she just never wants to

Damn!

I sent her every type of flower
I played the guitar by the hour
I padded her revolting little Chihuahua
but still she just didn't want to

I wrote a song with 100 lines
I picked a bunch of dandelions
I walked her through the trembling pines
but she just even then didn't want to
she just never wants to

I thought I'd try another 'tack
I'd drink a litre of cognac
I threw up down her back
but she just laughed and said she just didn't want to

I thought I'd have another go
I called her my little ho
I felt like Marcel Marceau must feel
When she said that she just never wanted to
She just didn't want to

I got the no pussy blues

I got the no pussy blues

Woah! Damn!

Watch this nerve-cracking and gut-wrenching video here.

This post is taking to much time in the middle of a perfect full moon night and I don’t want to review the other songs. Do some work lazybums and find out for yourselves.

This is an excerpt from a Grinderman interview about the naming of the band.

Interviewer: How did you come up with the band name?

Cave: In those original sessions, the word "Grinderman" came up because of the John Lee Hooker song of that name. I was singing that song, riffing on that idea. Around that time we got this extraordinary loop from Warren [Ellis], and I played around with singing the title over that loop [which became the album's title track]. Later on we were fishing around for a name and having a lot of difficulty finding one that hadn't already been claimed. That might sound ridiculous, but if you Google just about any possible name, six other bands have called themselves that. For some reason no one had called themselves Grinderman, except some act in Vegas. I think it's Mr. And Mrs. Grinder or something like that, and to them we give our apologies. But the name seemed to sum everything up. And it turns out John Lee Hooker's song came from the Memphis Slim song "Grinderman Blues", so having that kind of history behind it made the name feel right.

Overall, the album is kick-ass! It remains to be seen whether Grinderman comes out of the Bad Seeds closet again. The album quiet simply, Grinds is way to glory and it can possibly make to the Top5 rock album list for 2007, assuming Axl Rose fails his promise to deliver Chinese Democracy, again!

ID and only 5 grams

Coffee shops licensed to sell marijuana in the southern Dutch city of Maastricht will begin fingerprinting customers and scanning their IDs this summer to help prove they're following rules governing such sales.

In particular, the measures are expected to help stores show they are not selling to underage customers and that they haven't sold more than the maximum permitted to a customer on a given day.

"This is not something that we are doing willingly, but with pain in our hearts," Marc Josemans, chairman of the Union of Maastricht's Coffee Shops, said Wednesday. He said shops in Rotterdam and several Dutch border cities were considering following suit.

"We're very afraid we're going to lose customers over this, and to be honest we're even a little ashamed we're doing it, but the city of Maastricht has such harsh punishments that we don't feel we have any choice," Josemans told The Associated Press.

I thought I will inform my friends Angryman, Happy Rajesh and Broadness who were planning for this Amsterdam trip. Read more about it here.

Hmmmm ……

I have one question. Can’t I go to more than one shop and get as much stuff as I need for a big party?

Pirate? .... Not really!

What a relief! India fails to break into the list of top 15 countries with pirated software. Read about it here in The Economist.

The agency concerned, Business Software Alliance, compiled the report with data based on the average worth of pirated software per computer. I wonder if this report truly reflects the correct picture. I think India has a population which is far more than any of the countries featured on this list and the total loss incurred in dollar value could be much more in a country like India. Moreover, smarter and evolved users might have installed only selected softwares rather than installing everything under the sun, partly accounting for the questionability of this report.

And you thought this is going to be about Pirates 3 ? HaHa....

Kick the Bottle

“Serving our local water in reusable carafes makes more sense for the environment than manufacturing thousands of single-use glass bottles for someone to use once and throw away”

Restaurants in the US are increasingly kicking the bottle to the delight of many environmentalists.

Can you picture something like this happening in upscale restaurants in India in the next 10 years? I don’t think so. Unless ofcourse someone tries to copy this model for the sake ‘Indianizing’ another US model.

This somehow reminds me that filtering the water in Chennai even with hundred different filters can’t possibly make it any better. Atleast, that’s the line of thought CMC (Chennai Municipality Corporation) seems to be currently on, unfortunately adding to the woes of immigrants to the city with thinning hair. Please note that there is no offence meant to the Chennai-ites, I sincerely don’t think they have enough hair to worry about the state of municipality water.

Hunter S Thompson – The Man and the Cacti plant

“San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

The quoted text above is the famous “wave speech” that Hunter S. Thompson often cited during interviews and is from his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I had read this book a long time back and like many young people had idolised it for all the wrong reasons. At that time the only thing I felt was this deep connection with the author who talked so passionately about drugs. The man himself, unlike Timothy Leary (many say Leary was publicist and a media-monkey) was very unpredictable. His biographer has said that, “In any given situation, as soon as he feels there's a system closing in, he'll destroy it”

Anyways, I have too many things to say and too many images in my mind about Hunter S Thompson but the one thing that has interested me most is the way he had arranged his own funeral.

On August 20, 2005, in a private ceremony, Thompson's ashes were fired from a cannon atop a 153-foot tower of his own design (in the shape of a double-thumbed fist clutching a peyote button) to the tune of Bob Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man, known to be the song most respected by the late writer. Red, white, blue and green fireworks were launched along with his ashes. As the city of Aspen would not allow the cannon to remain for more than a month, the cannon has been dismantled and put into storage until a suitable permanent location can be found. According to widow Anita Thompson, the actor Johnny Depp, a close friend of Thompson (and portrayer of Raoul Duke in the movie adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), financed the funeral. Depp told the Associated Press, "All I'm doing is trying to make sure his last wish comes true. I just want to send my pal out the way he wants to go out."

Peyote cannon. I know he lived on the right side of the sixties, but a peyote cannon? What could have possibly ushered him to peyote? Only thing I had known about peyote before this is that it is a source of mescaline, which unfortunately, I have never experienced. I got reading about peyote synthesis, peyote cultivation, peyote communities, legal issues with peyote, its history and they are all mind-boggling.

Peyote (Lophophora williamsii) is a small, spineless cactus whose native region extends from the southwestern United States (including the states of Texas and New Mexico) through central Mexico. It has been used for centuries for the mystical effects experienced when it is ingested.

Peyote is reported to trigger states of deep introspection and insight that have been described as being of a metaphysical or spiritual nature, and it is also said that the trip is more spiritual than acid. Often used within religious groups and native americans (for whom the use of peyote is protected by law), peyote can be used in ceremonial context by shamans and community doctors. They are supposed to have magical effects and could be used to combat social ills and diseases. It is also said in Native American circles that consuming peyote can lead a man to his destiny and gives them insight. I was thoroughly fascinated by this information so I wanted to know about lophophora cultivation. This is where I guess the fascination ends because all lophophora species are extremely slow growing, often taking up to thirty years to reach flowering age in the wild. Though human cultivated plants grow much faster.

I found this amazing blog on lophophora cultivation and also this. I have also found a list of vendors who sell seeds and infants that have just germinated. The only thing holding me back is the legal consequences of getting this shipment to India. Hopefully, I will figure out something. The calcutta atmosphere is ideal for lophophora growth ….. hot and humid, the composition of the soil can also be simulated. The germination rate of seeds is 70-90%. I guess all I have to do is wait for 15 odd years for my own plant to flower….and then divine nirvana!

No Idea

What makes me more miserable? Listening to love songs or watching romantic comedies? I guess both. When you are 25 and don’t see yourself going anywhere these questions are best left unanswered. I am a square peg in a round hole….not denying it. My social interaction is 0%. I am happy to stay in my room all day long and not talk to anyone even if the opportunity presents itself. No direction. No intervention. GMAT prep scores are a huge disappointment. I think the only thing I have done the whole day is played ‘Mama I coming home’ on my guitar at least 15 times and then while finding the lyrics for this song on the net I also chanced upon the lyrics for ‘Mama Said’, so I played that also. Other than that ….. nothing. Absolutely Nothing! At 6 o’ clock in the evening I somehow found myself contemplating suicide…..wtf! I think not smoking up can really have consequences. I gonna do something about it. These kind of thoughts have to be buried.

The Crap Economist

I made a special observation about the multiplexes in the city. They are more like casinos. You enter and find yourself in a hyper-real world. Eyes widen in glee and hands start shaking. Who remembers what happened behind the doors of a casino anyway! It’s your time for time-out and you will happily forget the real world and the famished boy asking for two rupees at the red-light.

Everything looks perfect. Models on billboards with perfect teeth and good skin. Customised music, mellowed down to reflect the intended texture of any floor space. Bargains that are always too good to be true. Combo meals. Spatial arrangement of products and ad’s with the skimpy model behind that makes you do a double-take. Low-key products camouflaged with outstanding branding and strategically placed among superior peers, so you can easily cherry pick them. Food that more often than not looks way better than it actually tastes (they sometimes even induce your appetite). Inviting movie posters for otherwise intolerable movies, making them look larger than life. Hell!…even the people there look happier and more colorful than otherwise.

But all that jazz didn’t keep me blinded for long. I think of City Centre as an infinite sink. Whoever goes into it, drains his mullah in the sink (mind you very unknowingly). Everyday the sink gets more powerful and attractive and draws more people towards it. Trust me, you will find a way to put some money in the sink somehow. Be it a bottled water or something as harmless as an ice-cream, it doesn’t matter; the money goes to the sink. So even if there is no will, there is always a way!

Rethinking the situation, is it not more like Uncle Scrooge’s vault? Most people who enter, drop at least one gold coin, and the heap of gold keeps growing taller and mightier. Needless to say Scrooge and his nephews gets to do all the gold surfing.

I have been a big patron, I do not deny it, but how can I help? It’s a casino for god’s sake! It’s the best place in the desert and unlike mirages, they are all real.

But don’t stop spending! Who knows …. maybe I will be the one drafting ingenious retail strategies in the future.

Just Dropped In ... to see what condition my condition was in

Mr Jimi Hendrix’s favourite song, Just Dropped In, is said to reflect the LSD experience. Our Goa trip earlier in the year featured this song on numerous occasions. I got introduced to it courtesy the notorious Sujjo Sutta! Also featured in the movie The Big Lebowski, this song is psychedelic dream sequence for The Dude.

The memories of Goa are a little distant, but I clearly remember the trip (or the trips). I generally don’t fudge around with anyone when they are really tripping (which I think was the case with everyone) so I will just talk about my own trip.

We were very lucky to find ‘da man’ in Goa (through our Manipal connections) and the stuff he gave us was awesome! Hoffman stamps, freshly prepared for the New Year, which we consumed in Feb. This particular stamp, from our contact, had got rave reviews in Manipal and I was more than curious to try it.

It all started out in a very usual way. The first day/night in Goa is usually spent getting used to the environment, finding lodging, getting the best deal for transport, stocking up the refrigerator, stocking up all the happy stuff and the likes. Pretty uneventful, but nevertheless the completion of these trivial tasks with poise pays rich dividends later. Of the six people who came together for this trip from different parts of the country, only three guys including me reached on the first day.

Now, usually February is a very good time to visit Goa for all junkie population, because Goa is not over-crowded, the parties keep happening regularly and all the lazy firungs who have shifted base to Goa before the New Year are still tripped out and want to party more. And then there are these other firungs who are bigger junkies and they stay in Goa for real long. Infact, when we used to go from college we kept seeing the same firungs in different raves over a period of 6 months or more. But not this time! Goa has been victimised. There have been issues with cops and locals, who have got pissed with all the collective junkie activities and very few parties were scheduled. We were unlucky to miss out on the Hiltop rave which started the same evening we left.

Btw, we found a white gypsy in decent condition. The guy renting out the gypsy, a very good salesman, told me that there is lot of gas in the tank and since the fuel gauge was not working the only way to judge this was to see through him. We found out after some 20 odd kms that his claim was indeed very shitty. But we still got a good deal during ‘season time’, so I was not let down by this betrayal.

Our first night, and three of us want to have the real Goa feel. So the hunt began. Where is the party? You generally keep asking the firungs and the peddlers. Sometimes even they are not sure. I have had enough experience in finding parties and spotting out the junkie firungs. So we just kept riding aimlessly, always looking out for over-speeding firungs who looked like prospective ravers and followed them. Most of the ravers are speed fanatics so I had considerable problems keeping up with a 100 cc scooty in a 1300 cc gypsy engine.

However, this old trick payed-off on the first night and we very lucky to hit a party that night itself. On the three remaining nights this trick failed miserably (cos there were no parties) …. and people really started doubting my knowledge about the rave scene. Next up, the trip…..very honestly I really don’t remember things in entirety and I will refrain from giving out details. By the time we hit this party at WestEnd - ‘the place where the party never ends’ in Salegaon, it was pretty late. We sure as hell were not expecting to hit a party and hence had not stashed ourselves with the party poopers. But we got hold of this peddler who was talking too much crap and was trying to act like Ali G and Prince (not William) at the same time. I seriously did not trust him a little bit and gave him no ‘Respect’. He got us stamps which I think only I took. Rawat was very happy to hit a party the first night, something that he will keep reminding me. Most people in this party were Russians. It was like a mini Russia. Most of them could’nt even speak proper English. But, who is talking? We met this Russian couple who were smoking some really cool stuff. I don’t know exactly what she rolled but it was very smooth and minty. Stoning, drinking and grooving kept repeating in a loop.

Since we were supposed to receive the other guys early next morning….we left when we could still make it back. Surdy and Rawat slept real fast and so did I after having done some uppers. But the worst part about acid is it could really fuck up your sub-conscience. I got horribly psyched in my dreams. I woke up ….shit scared in the middle of the night in an unknown bed. Sleeping people and palm trees started making creepy sounds and the darkness was moving around in all shapes and sizes. Shadows on the walls started morphing into scary creatures. Everything had become spooky. Major hallucinations. I think I popped the stamp very impulsively and didn’t think too much about the consequences. It was too much for ‘the happy me’ to handle and I thought I will try to sleep more. By no means was it a good option but it was the only one I had. I always feel deep down that somehow I can control/influence my trip, and since this was not happening at all, I put all the blame on a long journey (cabs, autos, plane, mubai local train, drunken glory, stoned delight, crappy bombay black…ect ect ). I somehow made a promise to myself that I would never sleep again when I am on a hardcore acid trip. It is the last thing you want to do. Your body might be resting but mind is just going crazy, in all directions.

5 o clock. Sagoo calls me up and informs that they have landed on hallowed ground. The other two were too stoned to move so I just set out alone to get the rest of the gang. It was infact a relief. I did not want to sleep anymore and I thought witnessing the sunrise might just do me some wonders. Enter Sujjo, Sagoo and Great Polly - ‘the Jaribooti Baba’. Sujjo was ripped off, literally. His rear pocket was torn apart and he was trying to protect his behind with some backpack and failing every time. Thanks to the boxers, I did not have to witness his ass! We had breakfast at the first decent breakfast shop which opens up in Calangute (I think it was Joe’s Café) and then reunited with the rest of the folks, who were still in deep slumber.

Lot of things happened that day which I am skipping because none was relevant to the trip. But we got one big funky chillum from a flea shop and 1 tola. On an average we consumed about 1.25 tolas every day during our trip among the six of us. My official drink for the trip was Bacardi Breezer. I think I drank more Breezer than water. Sujjo was in charge of providing us music. He had come prepared with his Goa play list, his portable speakers and phunky fone. So we had the music part covered, at all times.

I think the only place which was happening that night was 9 bar. I remember taking the order for stamp procurement for the whole trip. It was supposedly 20 stamps. Somehow, there were late adjustments to the order and our peddler ran off because that is the way he operates. Very weird guy! Anyways we re-established contact with him and after a bit of coaxing he delivered our downsized order. The only guys to pop that night were me, Polly and me (hahaha) again. I don’t remember much of what happened that night. We had gone to 9 Bar and it was late, so party got over before we could take any real feel. After that we fanatically tried to find a secret rave happening somewhere. There were these firungs who started following us (for a change!). They somehow thought that we knew where we are going and we will succeed in finding a party. We engaged in this activity collectively for hours, after this the firungs gave up and then Polly, Sujjo and Sagoo also got mind-fucked with Leelayz games, so they wanted to go back as well. Rawat and Surdy were still game to find the party….so some more very eventful crazy hours followed. Lot of shit happened which is beyond the scope of this post.

Day Three. Everyday in the morning we somehow ran out of stuff...didn’t know why. While everyone was thrashing anything that was available in a late morning breakfast at Infantaria, Rawat and I went to score one more tola (we would repeat this activity diligently for the rest of the days when we were in Goa, some times more than once a day). And this is the time I realised that I was just tripping without any reason. No stimulus required. It was all superfluous. Everything was beautiful and calm. Sometimes I would just see things and jump up, shocked by something very mundane. Days were generally good but the nights were really horrible at times. Streets lamps, cats, flying plastic bags, roaring waves, stones on the road, bushes, palm trees, domestic animals….. almost anything under the sun would make me jump at times. I was seeing people with arms so long that they could catch me from 200 yards. Street dogs, so big, that they could gobble me up in seconds. People with their face changing all the time. People with faces resembling animals and birds. I knew what was happening. I have seen this before, so I choose not to get mind-fucked. Crazy shit was happening around me all the time and I would more often than not choose not to get psyched. Great Polly told me, ‘Obviously, if you choose to go crazy on acid you will see things Leelay’.

On the brighter side, we went on a road trip that day. We had many mini-maps with different levels of detail and demarcation, which I had brought along. This day was supposed to be North Goa day. We had spotted a beach on some island in the map and that was what we were pursuing. For a change I was not doing any driving. Baba was the man in charge. He had told me last night (when we had both popped the Hoffman stamps) that the way I drive gets him psyched and he kept on whining for sometime for no reason (that’s what I thought). How was I to know that I will meet with a similar fate when Rawat does the driving on the last night of the trip! Anyways, Polly on the wheel and we keep going north. Sujjo got crazy with his camera. The natural bong tourist instinct captured him completely. We crossed many beaches, some really good ones, some not so good, but we kept going northwards and taking intermittent smoking breaks in our brand new funk chillum. Finally we were very near the state border and the only way we could have gone any forward was by taking a ferry, which was unfortunately non-operational. So we retraced our way back to the last beach we had passed across. On closer observation we found it to be awesome. Non-commercial to the right extent (it had a lone shack providing all the liquor), un-exploited and very beautiful. It even had this shallow patch in the middle of the sea during low tide. Few of us took our bottles and chilled on that patch till the time of high tide. It was one hell of an activity we did. Apart from that we just lazed on the beach sipping our poison. If you happen to see Sujjo’s snaps in Orkut you will know what I mean. We saw a few guys from the England International Rugby team on that beach. Anyways (I will tell ya more juicy stuff), there was also this firung babe and Surdy wanted to hit on her very desperately. He kept giving me regular updates what the babe was doing. I was least bothered and was happily lazing in the sun, but I subconsciously kept spurring him on, for the sake of continuity. I could feel all his emotions in this particular order…..Excitement, anxiety, set-back1, rant, set-back2, rant, rant, rant rant…after that I stopped listening, he is a Surd, I just let him speak. Set-back1 happened when some local guy started hitting on the chick and set-back2 was when they started making out on the beach after talking for like 10 - 20 minutes. I told Surd he is good for nothing and that any chu***a local can take his trip. After this where ever we went Surdy was on the lookout for locals getting lucky. And he kept updating me regularly, day or night, even if I want him to or not. That was the major trip he was on for the rest of the trip. At the end of the trip, I think he had enough data to compile a book about how locals got lucky in Goa.
We were on our way back, the sun was going down and it was unanimously decided that we should all pop. I had exhausted my quota of stamps but The Great Polly unselfishly let me have his stamp. The idea was by the time we are back in Anjuna and ready to hit a party we should all be immensely happy. Just for the count I am on my fourth stamp. Mind you, very potent ones! I don’t know what happened after sometime everyone was happy. Me and Polly dropped the gang off at 9 bars and went to meet our beloved peddler again.

9 bars was awesome that night. This was as close it got to the real party that we are so used to. They were lot of people because this was the only place happening. But we hardly cared for anything now. Everyone was in the psytrance mode….all jumpy jumpy. People smoking huge chillums next to the DJ as always. I don’t remember the name of this DJ but he was a really small kid playing groovy shit. We were all feeling alive. Since everyone was on their own trip I didn’t have much opportunity to interact. I had found my own groove and was feeling very euphoric. My head started swinging to the beats and for the next 20 odd days and whenever I had a flashback, it (my head) would swing without any real impetus from me.

I met some people at 9 bar from college including Jabs. Jabs is a Goa freak and an Indian Hippy (in true sense). I remember freaking him out with my acid trip the first time he had come to Goa and he was reminding me of the good old days. Anyways there were lot of people now and we smoked the peace pipe, while sharing our experiences of psycho-actives that we were on. Many people, many drugs, many opinions but true reviews of all that we had abused. By this time Sujjo was in a really different state. He had his revelation staring at the sky. He stopped talking and told me he will recount everything later……which has not happened yet! I think that night everyone was tripped out more than any other night. I remember Sagoo getting very good feel out of the party.
Jabs told us that some party is going start in the middle of the night at 4 o’ clock. A morning rave! But we had lot of time to kill before that and the only places open were Club Cabana and Paradiso. Cabana we didn’t want to go because it is too commercial and we had obvious entry problems. We were pondering about attending the morning rave which we were not quite sure of. We parked the gypsy outside Paradiso and took a hike to the beach. Polly had popped his stamp and was on a different trip. He didn’t want the jumpy trip, or maybe he wanted to trip on something else for a change and started tripping on the dark sea from a stony cliff. Sometimes, I actually sponge off people’s trip so even I started doing the same. Anyways we didn’t know what we are gonna do next. So without any impetus I started roasting a fag. After this something happened, which has retarded Rawat ever since. And even now when I call him to smoke in some park or some other public place he whines like anything and brings up the instance of this particular incident. His logic: Dude, if it can happen in a place like Goa, it can happen anywhere. What happened is, two cops came from nowhere and caught me with all the roasted tobacco on a sheet of brilliant white paper. I thought they were apparitions, which I was pretty used to by now and didn’t exactly react. I had 6 stamps on me. No charas though….it was all with Polly. However I had this bag on my lap which had all our smoking accessories. I think we carried ourselves very coolly and that was one of the reasons we got off, otherwise we could have been in real deep shit.
This was really a trip spoiler experience. All my high was gone. After this we just went to Paradiso. It was good, but the cop incident had left its scars on our fragile minds and it took us some time to recover. There were special events happening that night and it was an ‘ok type’ place to be in. But it comes nowhere near any rave, so we had enough reasons to get disappointed. But again when you are that high, place hardly makes a difference. I was just happy to pump to the psytrance and trip on the psychedelic paintings. Ohhh….one funny thing happened. We saw this guy (Indian) who was totally zapped and the only thing he was doing was pointing out at a Nataraj statue and saying, “OM …sumthing…. sumthing …..fucked”. ‘Om’ and ‘fucked’ these were the only two words we could make out. And he kept doing it at regular intervals. On probing him we found out he was also on Hoffman, though I do not trust anything said by a guy who is so zapped. After this we met few people from South Africa, who wanted to know the legend of the Nataraj and Shiva. Between hash ‘J’s and Indian sprites I told them lot of funky stuff related to Indian mythology they got pretty zapped. I think we gave them a lot of info about Goa and the hippy scene in India. They looked pretty inspired. Anyways it was wee hours of the morning, some people wanted to go back. Some did not. Finally, I dropped off whoever wanted to take some rest to the hotel and took Rawat and Sujjo for sunrise to Candolim. I do not remember if I popped something. But this was my time for revelation. Atmosphere was very chilly, the sand was unbelievably cold, and the wooden beds on the beach were layered with a thick film of moisture. It hardly made a difference…. I didn’t give a shit about getting my clothes wet. No music. No talking. No other unwanted sound. Nothing in sight but the sea and the first glimpses of the rising sun. We lazed on the wooden beds for quiet sometime till the sun started bothering us. I think I felt asleep also. It was a very good sleep. The thing about acid is, you feel ecstatic in all the things which are natural and it combines with the natural beauty enhancing it by many folds. I was very happy to be at one with nature…. and since I have had similar acid trip before I started having flashbacks. Déjà vu. All the things that had made me happy before. Saw all the different brilliant colors in the sky, clouds constantly making patterns and re-arranging themselves in fluid motion, trying to tell me a story. Angels appearing out of the thick fog (ya…I was still getting jumped sub-consciously!). Dark waves, very inviting and immensely trippy, somehow they seemed more profound than they normally are and very hungry. Everything had found a balance. Everything was synchronised. There was a reason for everything. I was totally tuned in and was dropping out. Everything had opened up in some way. Everything was connecting with me. We all shared a bond in the cosmos. It was Paradise! Priceless, in Matercard terms. This was the one moment which alone made my Goa trip worth everything. We had to go back to the hotel after some hours. Nobody spoke much on the way back.

Day Four. This was the day we had kept aside for South Goa. Polly insisted that we should let Sujjo be creative with his camera and let him harness his inherent bong photographer spirit. His exact words of wisdom were, “Surjjo …je le apni jindagi”. Please note that this phrase has since been patronised as ‘je le’. Physically I was exhausted. I think everyone was sleeping at some point of time. But I was always roaming around or even if I was in the hotel I was busy crushing and filling (remember the chi…no more rolling) and hardly sleeping. Honestly, I was not very keen on this south Goa trip. But anyways we went. One good thing happened before we started on our journey. We got a bottle of Smirnoff Green Apple for free (please don’t ask how….there are trade secrets sometimes). We kept sipping off the Smirnoff directly from the bottle and had enough rolled ones for the way not to get us bored. So, there were no interruptions on this journey. I think we went pretty near Palolim and then started retracing back. This trip I was not enjoying at all. The sun was too hot ….I was cursing myself for not getting an A/C Versa instead of this gypsy when we were getting both at the same rate. Open air, wind in your face and 4WD …my ass!

We saw the carnival on our way back. It drastically increased our commute time because most of the streets in Panjim was blocked out. Nevertheless, it was a good experience, I was swaying to whatever music they were playing (I think with that much acid in my body I would sway to anything), and the photographer aka Sagoo (Surjjo had started outsourcing his work) had a ball. Without going into details I can tell you the carnival looked very trippy to me. Back at Calangute, tired as hell, we had some time off playing with our beloved possession and doing Boom.

It was going to be our last night in Goa. Everyone knew that. So we thought we will all indulge in drunken glory. We carried all the booze we had and parked ourselves in some shack away from people and very sparsely populated. We had couple of stamps left. I popped one more. Sagoo and Polly shared one. This time I initially started off getting a smooth trip and it remained smooth. The night generally gives you the creeps when you are on acid. I wanted to be psyched for a change. Feel fear. Get on top in this power play with the drug, control it, control my mind….all that bullshit. So I took off alone. Got the music from Sujjo and kept playing two tracks on repeat. One was obviously, ‘Just dropped in’ the other one was by Seal, and I kept walking. I was getting jumped all the time, but not scared. It all seemed to be a part of a higher cause.

After sometime I got tired and rested on a wooden bed, which was part of many closely packed lines of similar beds. All were empty, there was no one anywhere as far as I could see. This Seal song was really speaking for the moment about stuff like in a sky full of people only some want to fly. I don’t know what was it all about but for sure it made the sky and all the stars more beautiful. By this time the acid was kicking in. Every star seemed to have a perfect reason to shine. I was actually too lost and these experiences are difficult to account for. All I can say is that I was on a supremely spiritual trip. Somehow nothing is constant and as I turned around I could see people all over the place. Doing exactly what I was doing. You know sometimes acid just keeps spoiling it…bloody hallucinations! I was still trying to battle all my darkest fears, so I laid there for some more time with all the frighteningly imaginary people all around me. After some more time when the feel good factor was getting over-weighed by the getting psyched-out factor I just got up and went back. Everyone got moderately drunk. I think only Sujjo killed it with all might with little help from some monk dude.

Whenever I am on acid I just want to hit a party. I guess it keeps me from psyching out. So I wanted to go on the wild party hunt again. Not many were supportive of the cause but I found company in Rawat and Surdy.

As usual we did lot of roaming. By strange coincidence we met a very weird German guy who had a shack and indulged in some collective potting with his big hippy group, who were also very sad because there were no parties. After this we just resigned. However much we wanted we knew we cannot hit a party. So what is the next best thing to trip on? The Saturday Night Flea Market. By this time my trip was goiing from bad to worse. I somehow convinced myself that I shouldn’t drive because of the excess amount of acid in my body and really because I was having such a tough time concentrating on the road. Everything was psychedelic, even the steering wheel. So I decided to let Rawat drive, since he was comparatively in a much better state. What can I say, it was the worst decision I ever made. I got psyched beyond all reckoning and I think I actually psyched Rawat also. Things became very bad for me. I started seeing aliens. Every face on the road was an alien face. Some faces were just disintegrating. I thought that Rawat was desperately trying to crash the car and kept scolding him for lack of driving acumen. Whatever, I couldn’t take it anymore and we all decided to check out the Flea Market. Oh Man! It was an amazing experience. Among other things, I found a glow in the dark painting of Shiva and another one with some Elephants. On observing closely, I could see the elephants rushing towards me, literally coming out of the picture. Even the background got animated. I wanted to buy it but since I was getting so psyched by it decided not to carry it along, you never know if the elephants really come out of it. Some more aliens and spirits and giant moving trees and cars-that-would-metamorph-into-animals later, we reached the hotel. I just slept after that. Needless to say I got mind fucked in my dreams also. But somehow this felt better than witnessing aliens everywhere around you.

Day five. This is the day we all left Goa. Our initial plan was to go back to Bombay and attend Roger Waters in the flesh gig which was happening that very night. But some how people backed out, I think everyone had too much to handle (…or was it only me?)

We had abused Bombay Airport before this also. Did it again. And then flew back to the normal life.

I have tried to recount events to the best of my cognitive abilities and recall prowess. However, I have skipped all details about sight seeing and visiting beaches. Who wants to read them anyway? And the part about hogging like pigs everywhere we went. When you have so many tolas, as we did, you are bound to feel hungry!
I even tried to figure out what happened in which day by looking at all the snaps that these guys have taken. But for sure there could be discrepancies because when I asked Sujjo about some details he told me I don’t remember anything ….it is like what people say about the 60’s.

SSDD – Same Shit Different Day

Its is 1:14 AM monday morning …..no special reason but I think I should resurrect AcidNirvana. After all, brand names are built on recall and I don’t think many people will remember this name anymore.

Everything around me has changed since the last blog entry and so have I. (One weird observation …..Office 2003 does not have the word blog in its dictionary…bloody nonsense!) . I am supposed to study for GMAT….what should I say to that wishful thinking? Hahaha…..For everyone concerned please let me assure you I am putting atleast 5 hrs everyday on GMAT prep....stoned or sober.

Ok lets talk about changes now. Things I don’t like anymore…….

1. Staying at home…..and trying to be a responsible 25 years old man.
2. Office work ………..it sucks! And for the record.....I love INFOSYS. I don’t think there is any better IT company in India. *Make mental note for a prospective blog post*
3. Blue Rizlas and Club. Haven’t used them in ages!
4. Being away from all my near and dear friends…..yes yes I miss you all!
5. Not living in Flossie Appartments anymore. I miss “The Flossie Steps”. I liked them more than my room and invariably spent more there than any other place in Flossie.
6. Not wearing tie to office. Tie makes a lot of difference! Friend of mine told me I should follow the Buddhist principle of treading the middle path…since everything I do is generally very extreme. Perfect example is this tie rule. Since there is no rule in my new company abiding employees to wear formals…and since no one comes to office like they are supposed to, I have gone to the very extreme. Totally messed up hair (rite now I kindda complement the Jimi Hendrix’s face on my t-shirt)…classic rock t-shirts…no razor…tattered jeans....dirty white sneakers……red school bag. And that too everyday! My PM told me that all this is BCG violation ….but for me, I either have respect or total disregard and anyways I am anti-authoritarian.
7. Desktops……they are passé….two desktops in the house and I am too lazy to get up from the bed and use any of them. BTW got new laptop …. and Gill will agree it is feeeeel. I think he has better feeeeeel but nevermind!
8. Arrshholes….this evening I met one. I was coolly doing what I do best in FD park and Mr. A walks upto me and breaks my peace. I really wanted to punch him in the nose at one point.

Please judge the story by yourself and rate Mr. A

Me and Mono busy crushing……
Along comes Mr.A. He actually does a reverse turn.

Mr.A : What is ur name ?

Me : Subho

Mr A : Where do u stay ?

Me : FE

Mr. A : Do u think u can have G here ?

Me : What is the problem ?

Mr. A : [Takes out his phone …..shouts out at a bunch of distant people]. Now I will show you what is the problem. What do u do?

Me : Musician…..and I am studying in college in bangalore.

Mr A : How old are you?

Me : 23

Mr A : So have u passed out?

Me : No ….I have many backs. [Since he is talking so much I am trying to get him emotional…..how filmy]

Mr A : [Looking at Mono] What about you ?

Mono : Same story ….we are in same college.

Now Mr. A has waited too long for his friends ….we were ready to move out. He tries to grab me and make me stay.

Me : Better not touch me.

Mono : We are leaving lets go.

Now I am really pissed …..lot of adrenalin pumpin in …..

Me (gesturing at Mr A) : Go (as if he is the hostage).

Chaos and drama starts after this……obviously Mono is the mediator. I really wanted to thrash this guy….and I think he also wanted to do the same. Finally we accept we are sorry and we go.

He tells us if I see you here again you will be in big trouble…..don’t come here again.

Am I the victimiser or am I the victim?

Up front it will seem I was the guy at fault. But if you observe closely enough there are many reasons to believe quiet the opposite. The park in question is undisputed property…I have grown up in that park. Mr. A …..I think he was 27 – 28ish …looked unemployed … affiliated to CPM (for sure…..I could make out from his haughtiness), he gives a rat’s ass about the park and is too smart to think about consequences of smoking up in public. All he wanted to do was show us that he is the man and actually I was quiet happy letting him be the man. But then SaltLake is my home turf ….and I shouldn’t be rattled by anyone. That was one of the reasons I got pissed. But it was a wise decision to let go, especially when we didn’t have any advantage (we were gonna get out-numbererd in the ratio of 1:7 or more).

One more thing I have decided, I will go and sit in FD park everyday now…..won’t do anything but will just go and sit there for cheap thrills. Bring it on Mr A….. lets play.

Ok all this violence is not good for my mental peace (should it be piece ? hahaha). So let me think what I can do now to relieve all this hatred… Actually since morning(7:00 AM) I am having a flash back of the Limp Bizkit song that we tripped on so much in college….the one with a chain-saw…..which says, “break ur ****ing face tonight”…what a coincidence!

So what do we learn from all this? Obviously there is a take away factor associated with every post on this blog. Aggressive lyrics can really shape our reality. Don’t indulge in them, and for god’s sake do not keep singing them to yourself if you don’t have anything better to do!

So the time comes for me to say good luck and good night to all of you. I feel like picking up the acoustic version AC/DC – You shook me all night long. Shit…it is 3:20 on the morning *varun chuckle…when he is trying to sleep before xams and me pandey and gill are laughing away to glory taking coffee break in the next bed*

Mama I am comin home

I wish I could add the word ‘forever’ to the title. But, as luck will have it, that’s an impossibility. So what’s the good news then, huh?
The good news is that I am gonna end my unknown and unhealthy existence for at least two long weeks starting from tomorrow. When I was growing up as a kid I never liked to stay at home. Always roaming around and never at home, that’s what my mom complained about. I will always remember the clichéd Bengali phrase(s) that I got, and the disappointment mom had because of this singular trait of mine.

I just love the food in Calcutta. Everywhere from the road side vendor to the classy five star you can feel the difference. People in Calcutta love their food and it really shows in the food you get there. I had a huge appetite a few years back, but now I am only a shadow of my former self. The briyani’s, kathi rolls, kababs which had dripping potions of fat used to be part of my regular diet. And this is where the problem begins…..
Whenever I go back home I have all these mouth watering delicacies prepared for me everyday. But what drives me is greed. So, whenever I am outside with my friends I always have my mouth full.

At the end of the day if I count the number of meals I have had then it would be triple the number a common man is allowed to have in our country. Double breakfast, double brunch, double lunch, double dinner …and every other meal I have, gets a bloody double. It’s like having two lives …. I don’t wanna tell mom that I have had food outside, because of all the trouble she took to make some special bong dish, the very smell of which makes me find special places in my tummy that I never thought existed.
Get the catch?

I know it’s not gonna be any different this time. The only thing I am worried about is that the combination of IT and Chennai has hurt me in the place where I am most vulnerable. I don’t have a good appetite anymore. No worries, ever heard the word ‘resurrection’ ? I am gonna perform an ancient Indian yagna to resurrect my appetite and set things right once again.

Obituary

Yesterday a very good friend of mine died after having a heart attack. I have known Biman for a long time and I was shocked and scared at the same time that it all happened. There is no one to blame now. All I can say is that he was a good man and it should’nt have happened.

I pray to God that his soul finds peace.

I will always remember the good and bad times we had together. The car and bike races, the movies we saw together, the stories of heartache we told each other, of all the times we acted like big gangsters in Saltlake, of the secret marriage in which I was a witness, of all the treats I forced out of him, exploits of all the evenings when we bunked tuitions, all the philosophical talk we had, the moments of agony we had together, the road accidents, night outs in the city, of all the times when he got paranoid because of the crazy stuff I did …….. I will never forget any of it. Whenever I have gone to Cal in the past few years, I used to be at his place everyday and wake him up for joy ride to Pandit Panwalla for morning fag. Never did he make excuses that he has to go to office and the likes. He had a big heart.

See you on the other side, buddy.

Biman Banerjee (1980 – 2006)
A true friend.

Superhero

Parikrama .... Celebrating the Software Developers

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Bill Gates, launches the next generation of integrated computing platform - Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, and BizTalk Server 2006 in India on December 9, 2005. Joining in the celebration is the Indian Rock band – Parikrama with a rock song just for software developers. Called `Superhero' the song is about the life of a programmer.



I have been listening to it since I came to office. It is .... all true!!!

Click here to download the song.

Lazy Lazy .....

Ok people first of all ….sorry for being a lazy blogger. Guess my new year has been too HAPPY (if ya know what I mean). Nevertheless, I am back to my office cubicle and my preferred lazy chair.
A lazy software professional will always have very lazy friends – that’s one important observation I have made. Even if he doesn’t have any friends then, he will always have television. Football on TV and beer was always my favorite combo meal. Anything else is just a waste of time and money. Sitting in my TV couch I seem to have this “supreme control” of a lazy geek.
Every emotion can be controlled in a hand picked way by changing the TV channels.
The set top box which gives you cable TV(only in Chennai) is an amazing device, and adds more control.
Other things are also pretty simple from this “TV couch”.

Anyone you wanna talk to …just call up. I even call up people who are in the next room. Someone needs to roll at times and I am never the one up for it. The only thing I do is order food. Marry Brown has started giving me burgers and fried chicken on credit, it seems I am a very regular customer and they wanna see some customer delight . So, even if I don’t have any money, still I can order their shit.
I have stopped latching the front door of my house and whenever the bell rings I just scream out two words ….”It’s open!”. All the people who deliver food to my place (the list is pretty huge) find it very convenient. Come in…put the food on the table … collect the money lying on the table …. put back the change on the table …. say, thank you sir….leave.

Ohhh….I am leaving out the best phase of this cycle. The order itself. How lazy is that ? huh?
Well I have always had my way with words and playing with the people who takes these orders is always fun.

Till date I have always got the best from any promo deal these people take out.
Subway, Pizza Hut, Pizza Corner, US Pizza, Marry Brown, Lee’s, Beach Palms have all been weighed, measured and found wanting….( I having a lot of fun writing this post. Try to figure out which movie influenced this extra filmi dialogue).
Now, people who don’t know me can never imagine what I am talking about. I will just give you an example …. ‘Tis not the best deal but one of the best.
Someone had this offer …”Order a medium pizza and get 50% off on a large pizza”. I ordered two medium pizzas and got a large one for free. How cool is that !

Not getting up from the couch is a norm I never break, unless, I have to relieve myself in someway. I turn social only on one night of the seven day week and rest of the six nights and seven days it’s me in front of the TV.

I can see the chances of heart attacks, dark circles, insomnia, obesity, liver dysfunction, tooth degradation, ectera ectera rise before my own lazy eyes. But all I can do is sigh and silently succumb to the lifestyle of a generation that is gonna drive our Nation.
Someone told me today that there is not much left of my lungs either. I know it’s true.

Why am I saying all this? This is a story everyone can relate to in some extent, so why I am telling you this boring shit? Well, precaution is the precise word. At some point of your life you are all gonna go through this phase of nothing to do in an unknown and remotely happening place. This all a perfect example of what you should not do. A generation feeding off man’s greatest invention – the television ……is just disgusting.

On that note, if anyone has any better ideas how to chill in Chennai please let me know.

Resolutions

I have been thinking about a New Year resolution which I am really gonna try and keep. It’s already 2nd Jan and let me tell you finding a real resolution is a lot more difficult than it looks. So let me try to eliminate a few options that I know are not gonna happen.

1. Quit Smoking – Definitely not. Smoke less that 20 fags a day ….very unlikely.
2. Keep a healthy balanced diet – Not possible while I am still in Chennai.
3. Work out and play Bball everyday – Maybe ….if I am not too lazy. This option might have some future.
4. Quit hardcore drugs for good – Hopefully! Can’t promise anything. If I land up in Goa I know I will be too tempted.
5. Stop drinking beer regularly – 50% of target achieved last quarter. Hoping for a better turnover in the future.

Ok now for a few resolutions which I really think I should work at:

1. Start GMAT preparations.
2. Quit being a Software Engineer.
3. Stop fighting for lost causes.
4. Maintain a good work-life balance – I must tell ya its pretty good rite now. Only problem is I don’t have any work.
5. Start taking my music more seriously.
6. Stop fucking around with people’s mind.

Any other suggestions are welcome. Selection is at my discretion.

I have already been suggested a few ….

1. Stop giving/rebutting fundas and counter fundas between the two of us. [Omang]
2. Stop telling stories. [Omang]

Not sure if I can stop doing these, buddy…..it’s my only source of tax free entertainment.

TNT

The countdown has begun. Last ten seconds till death.

Ten, nine……

Your senses leave you… you are paralyzed.
Soul leaving your body.

Nine, eight, seven……

Everything is in super fast rewind. Flashes of everything insignificant about all the significant people in your life. It’s a light trail. A brand new car zipping on the wet city roads.

Screams all around.

The clock still ticks on. Six, five.…

An empty road in the desert and twenty transparent cans of blue water with a smart a logo on each can.

Five, four….

The psychedelic trance of an unknown record is muted by the loud noise from a hundred church bells…. The ringing cold metal gives you a headache.

What would you not do to get it out of your head, now!

Four, three, two…..

One…Soul departing your body. Silence.
You are free now.

You wake up in the middle of the night, sweating profusely. The night becomes colder when the sweat dries out, you know about the endothermic reaction.

Click! A flash …..and another Click! A mouthful of smoke disturbs the thick streak of lighter particles in the reflected beam of a tall street lamp.
Out in the road there is only darkness and people who live in the dark. They are not your friends. There are no friends. Or enemies. Everyone needs to be hunted.

How many is it gonna be tonight?

There are no records yet. And there won’t be any. Everynight it should be the same. Not one more or one less. The magic number has already been decided…. 13.

There are no guns, no chainsaws, no samurai swords …just your bare hands to do the job. You are the not one who is gonna die. You are already dead. So fear not.
Remember …..comfort in your cozy apartment is shit. It’s all about self-destruction now. No one would want to watch a porno flick when you can have great sex.

Needles, needles, needles………needless to say …Needles!

Divine Intervention...

Yesterday for no special reason I was thinking about this conversation that takes place in Pulp Fiction between Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent Vega (John Travolta) before “blowing up the nigga’s brain in the car” scene.

(This happens after some guy shoots a dozen bullets at them and none of the bullets even get anywhere close to either of them)

Jules: This was Divine Intervention! You know what "divine intervention" is?
Vincent: Yeah, I think so. That means God came down from Heaven and stopped the bullets.
Jules: Yeah, man, that's what is means. That's exactly what it means! God came down from Heaven and stopped the bullets.
Vincent: I think we should be going now.
Jules: Don't do that! Don't you fucking do that! Don't blow this shit off! What just happened was a fucking miracle!
Vincent: Chill the fuck out, Jules, this shit happens.
Jules: Wrong! Wrong, this shit doesn't just happen.
Vincent: Do you wanna continue this theological discussion in the car, or at the jailhouse with the cops?
Jules: We should be fuckin' dead now, my friend! We just witnessed a miracle, and I want you to fucking acknowledge it!
Vincent: Okay man, it was a miracle, can we leave now?

And I am thinking about the other shit that Jules say in the restaurant….

There's a passage I got memorized. Ezekiel 25:17. The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.

I been sayin' that shit for years. And if you ever heard it, it meant your ass. I never really questioned what it meant. I thought it was just a cold-blooded thing to say to a motherfucker before you popped a cap in his ass. But I saw some shit this mornin' made me think twice.

Now I'm thinkin': it could mean you're the evil man. And I'm the righteous man. And Mr. 9mm here, he's the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could be you're the righteous man and I'm the shepherd and it's the world that's evil and selfish. I'd like that. But that shit ain't the truth. The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be a shepherd.

And I am thinking…… even I should walk the earth and try to be a shepherd, like Jules plans to do at the end of the movie.

And then there is this big thuud….. The car's gone and hit the divider on the ECR highway and bounced back off it. There’s no one behind us and so we were a bit lucky. We tried to move around to see if all our bones are in place...and eveything seemed alright.

Luckily, I was alright, the guy who was driving was alright and even the car was all right, not a single scratch or any dent.

After this, all that we talked about was that you should never drink and drive. And …..

...how tried you become if you are working all day that you might lose it sometimes.And…

....“Sometimes your mind is there…you are driving straight in your mind but you eyes aren’t there”.And ..…

.....we should always have music in the car or someone should keep talking, it keeps you awake that way.

And ……

But all I could think now is ...was it or was it not divine intervention ?

(I swear I am not bullshitting a bit …..I was thinking of this Pulp Fiction shit even before Narang hit the divider)

Read the full script for Pulp Fiction.

Points and places in the Sky

I have always been thrilled to name things or places the way I see it. There is this spirit of an ancient explorer in me that wants to find new places all the time. And though it’s a very naïve thought but I always seem to enjoy naming uninhabited or unexplored places and imagine that I was the first one to discover the secret groove of that very land. Even otherwise, naming places is a fun thing to do. This passion started developing beyond my imagination during my Manipal days. I was too tired of explaining to everyone this simple idea, “Dude, lets go to this totally trippy place I found last time. It’s an awesome smoking up location”. People would just act lazy and come back with these smart ass remarks like, “Every place is trippy man…we will smoke here why do you wanna go so far”.

One thing Manipal already had been a few points (don’t you naught people wander away in your thoughts now). Points are basically regions higher than its surrounding landscape and give a good glimpse of the sky. When, I had gone to Manipal there were a few points know to everyone. The End Point(the pic above) and road leading to the End Point was and still is very famous in Manipal. An endless list of activities and still to be publicly known events have happened at End Point. The early hours of the mellow sun attract quiet a few number of old uncles and aunties sporting their white sneakers on the road leading to End Point. Personally, I always hated hiking the 1 km stretch, but the compensation offered on reaching the summit some how compensated for the empty lungs.

Another point that is famous in Manipal is the Peacock Point. Although, I seldom went to the place when the peacock weren’t having their beauty sleep, no wonder I never saw enough peacocks there.

The problem was all these places had already been discovered and were never safe at night (aye, from the police). And so it all began. In less than a year we had our own points. Places that people might see everyday but only a handful of us knew their secret identity at night. Most of them were very reusable during the day as well because they are well hidden from the common man’s thoroughfare.

Star Gazers Point, Psychedelic Tree, Jimi Hendrix Point, Dispovan Forest, Shiva Temple, Haunted House, Voodoo Point, Dead Bird Tree, Polythene Mountain, Drug Point, Graveyard, Socks Point, Riyan Point (this has an awesome origin), Secret Football Ground, Ninth Block Point( this is nowhere near ninth block), Carpenters Point, Bikers Point, MIT Point……Pheew! The list is endless… and then there were so many places that we didn’t name at all because either they weren’t worth naming or had no historical/geographical significance.

Now Manipal, a small student city in a distant corner of Karnataka, India with the highest density of mobile phones in the country could have hardly boasted of so many points. Let me give a little more insight into how a few of these places got named.

Star Gazers Point – One the best finds. It has a clean rocky surface under the brilliant night sky. That how it got named….because all you can do from this place it gaze at stars.

Star Gazers opens up into an empty space. It is close to 9^th block and hence accessible at all hours of the night. It has the added advantage of being near to Juice center (all kind of exotic milk shakes) and Timmy’s.

Psychedelic Tree – This a huge banyan tree on the way to Peacock Point. It is on an unlit deserted road which is unusually very clean. There have been many instances when we crashed on the road itself. Some 7-8 bikes and around 15 people will crowd the place when party is on. But its better if we go here in small groups, gives you more peace of mind. The first time we tripped, we got damn psyched about the lone tree in the middle of nowhere, hence the name.

Jimi Hendrix Point – This is one totally spooky place. It gives you the same kind of feeling as you would get in the middle of the jungle in Blair Witch Project. You can’t see any sky or anything from here because the trees are too high. It’s on top of a hillock and trekking can be dangerous if you have never been here before. There is a small rundown shack or some house, though we have never gone anywhere close to it. The total theme of this place is not at all comforting in the beginning. It is a different high all together, that’s why we named it Jimi Hendrix point.

Shiva Temple - This is an awesome place at night. I have never been here in broad daylight. There is this big temple (though it’s always locked) surrounded by all kinds of holy trees. It opens up into a massive field (meant for cultivation). I don’t think many people know about this place because we always found it isolated. This place is good to hang out for long hours at night. Many an origin of abstract theories can be traced back to this inspiring temple. Oh! we were never sure it was a Shiva temple ….we always hoped it was….

Dispovan Forest – Haha …..Guess it!

Graveyard – This is actually a graveyard. A burial ground. I have just gone here twice on Maha Shiv ratri nights. Just wanted reinstate my belief in Shiva. This is a place where you should only go with two or three guys otherwise there is no point. It is a place to show that your belief is stronger than your fear. We excavated part of a skull from here the first time…….

And for last bit of history….. Riyan Point. It’s no point actually. It’s a banked turn on the Manipal – Goa Highway(NH17). You would usually be at 90- 100 on that stretch. Riyan missed the turn once, he went straight. He he he ….

The Celebration of the Lizard

December 8^th is the day the Lizard was born. Jim Morrison would be 62 today had he remained among us.

Born James Douglas Morrison in 1943, the future rock star grew up in Melbourne,Florida. Jim Morrison's upbringing was strict and conservative as the son of a Navy Admiral (Jim's showed us that conservative upbringing is pretty useless). In fact, it was not until college that Morrison even showed an interest in the arts.

After a brief stint at a Florida college, Morrison trekked to UCLA in 1964, where he studied filmmaking with such prestigious classmates as Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. Among the lesser cinematographic lights in attendance was a young hippie named Ray Manzarek, whose chief claim to fame as a director came from convincing his Swedish girlfriend to pose nude in one of his student films.

Anyways, they recruited Robbie Krieger (on guitar) and John Densmore (on the drums) and formed The Doors, a reference to Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception.

Morrison's preferred method of opening the "doors of perception" was chemicals, including mainly alcohol and acid (LSD), although he indulged in a buffet meal of anything he could get his hands on — and it being Southern California in the 1960s, that was rather a lot.

Their first single “Break on through” written by Morrison was a big hit. Their second single “Light My Fire” written by Robbie was an even bigger hit. Someone from the record company suggested that Morrison should change lyrics in the song from “Baby you could get much higher” to “get much better” so that it can be aired on National Radio. But Jim just hated authoritarians and the suggestion was thrown out of the window, he in fact screamed out the word “higher” much louder for the radio recording.

In concerts and offstage, Morrison became increasingly antagonistic toward authority figures, and in New Haven, CT, he suffered his first in a series of arrests for "public indecency" in concert. Morrison's drinking increased along with the band's success, and Doors concerts were often marred by his drunken incoherence and the damage alcohol was doing to his singing voice. There were instances when Jim would just pass out on stage and the rest of the band would keep playing and waiting for him to get up. And obviously there was the prolonged chant of “Fuck the Mother, Kill the Father!” in the song “The End” which not many people appreciated. Doors successfully began undertaking more ambitious musical projects, such as "The Celebration of the Lizard," a half-hour fusion of music, drama and poetry that left crowds stunned into utter silence by its conclusion.

Morrison also became more adept at manipulating crowds; it was not unusual for a Doors concert to end in a near-riot or an over-the-top orgy. Concert hall floors were routinely littered with discarded clothes at the end of a concert, which in turn brought the band under increasing scrutiny by promoters and local authorities.
On a hot night in Miami, in an overbooked concert hall,Morrison's various demons converged to create a spectacle that would haunt the remainder of the Lizard King's days. Drunker than ever, which was saying a lot, Morrison goaded the crowd throughout the concert, at one point directly confronting them with their own adulation for him —

You're all a bunch of fuckin' idiots.…
Letting people tell you what you're gonna do…..
Let people push you around ...
Maybe you love it.
Maybe you like being pushed around.
Maybe you love getting your face stuck in the shit...

After a long chant of “What are you goanna do about it," Morrison followed up by (allegedly) simulating illicit gestures on band mate Robbie Krieger, and (allegedly) exposing himself to the crowd.

Three days after the concert, the city of Miami filed an arrest warrant for Morrison, charging him with public indecency, profanity and drunkenness.

But nothing was ever goanna hold down the Lizard King. He had the spirit of the dead Indians in him. As a kid Jim witnessed an accident while traveling through the desert and it lest a lasting impression on Jim’s mind. In his own words …..

“Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind. Me and my mother and father, and a grandmother and a grandfather, were driving through the desert, at dawn, and a truck load of Indian workers had either hit another car, or just — I don't know what happened — but there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death. So the car pulls up and stops. That was the first time I tasted fear. I musta' been about four — like a child is like a flower, his head is floating in the breeze, man. The reaction I get now thinking about it, looking back — is that the souls of the ghosts of those dead Indians... maybe one or two of 'em... were just running around freaking out, and just leaped into my soul. And they're still in there."

I have lived off the American Prayer for a long long time and I all I have for the Lizard King is respect.
R.I.P.

New Blog Layout

I have been working on a new layout for Acid Nirvana. Its is still under construction (if you find out any missing links/issues please tell me).
I guess it goes with the 70's theme pretty well and obviously does justice to the name ACId.....

I have spent 8.8 billable hours on this item....worked intensively on photoshop and HTML tags...
Currently I have hosted it here (indianchai.blogspot.com). I am really not sure if I should switch to this.

Let me know how you guys like it.

Light my Fire !

I can now post pictures to my blog. I had initially planned to use Hello! but my office firewall dosen't let me connect through it.

Well, the issue has just been resolved, thanks to Photobucket. I am posting the only thing I have with me right now, one which is true to the core and always shows me the light.

Ma Zippo!



Ain't it cool ?

Age No Bar

Nearly 24 years and still all that I get to hear from people is,” You are still too young!” How can you retort to statements like these? Know what … I really don't care anymore.

But it has got me thinking things that I never thought before.

Whatever good you have done or intend to do, doesn’t mean a thing, because people always judge you for what you are and no one gives a f___ about who you are. What has been really disappointing and makes me write this is that people who have seen you everyday and know you doesn’t think any differently either.

I have had enough experiences as a kid, when no one would ever see things the way I saw. I just hated it when my dad used to try and make me understand, “Try and act mature!” or the ever so sympathetic gesture that I often got from mom, “You are so immature!” .Love, trust and faith just lose out when people start judging you by your age. However much sense you talk can’t make them feel any different.

After a point in time I used to hate it when other people used to put in a word so that I got saved (don’t even ask me from what … cos the list has just grown longer and longer as I have grown older). The reason they often gave was, “He is too young to understand all this. You can just let him be, it will all change with time”.

Yea…..I am listening to all you cronies and all I got for you is two tiny little fingers. Can you see them now or are they too small?

But how long can you keep holding you finger up against the world? I have just been doing that all my life and its time to set things right. So I have a list of questions. Anyone can be my guest and answer them.

1. Do you think parents should listen to their kids …just for the sake of listening to them? (We all know that they are never gonna act by what the kids have to say)
2. What do you think should be the legal drinking age?
3. What do you thing should be the correct age for obtaining a drivers license?
4. What could be the difference in age between a dating couple (Imagine the guy is younger)?
5. Do you think we should mock anyone who is way older than us….just to prove our point of view?
6. Does age equate to respect in any sense?
7. Does age equate to maturity and thought process?

I always liked seven, so let’s leave it at that because I am running out of questions now.

Dancing with Mr. Brownstone

Axl Rose recalls going out for a reconciliatory dinner with David Bowie, who he had earlier punched at a video shoot for paying too much attention to Erin Everly (Axl's former wife). "We started talking about the business and I never met anybody so cool and so into it and so whacked out or so sick in my whole life!" he said, "sick" being a high compliment in Axl's book. When the band later opened for the Stones, Jagger and a visiting Eric Clapton cornered him about it. "They were laughing, saying that when Bowie gets drunk he turns into the Devil from Bromley... "

I have been doing a lot of research on Guns and Roses for quiet sometime now. There was never any special intension but I just love the way they saw things in their early days....the baddest boys in Rock n Roll history and no one even comes close.

What these boys wanna talk about is the sleazy side of life, living in the gutter and getting by on an excessive combination of cursin', boozin' and stonin'!

Cobra-swaying Axl Rose was the charismatic ringmaster. To his right, Duff McKagan; a tall, bottle-blond whose clean-cut good looks belied his Seattle punkroots. To his left, Slash, one boot resting on a monitor, firing off riffs with the gleeful abandon of a man pissing his name into the snow. Behind them, sweating and shirtless, Steven Adler. Cleveland-born, but straight out of sunny smog-assed California: the quintessential blond himbo that likes to "hit things and get high". And then - last, as always, but not least - Izzy, who never found a permanent place for himself on stage, ghosting around at the sides and the back, scaring away crows.

Metallica's bad ass drummer Lars Ulrich dropped his jaws after listening to the lyrics on ‘Its So Easy’ from the Guns first album...

I see you standin' there
You think you're so cool
Why don't you just
Fuck off

Ya get nothin' for nothin'
If that's what you do
Turn around bitch I got a use for you
Besides you ain't got nothin' better to do
And I'm bored

But their allure is due to more than just their music, which is pretty primitive and hardly original. It’s their aura. They truly are for real, fucked-up street trash out for all they can get. They have shamelessly lived off the wages of strippers and dealers and whores up until this point, in hovels that seldom even had running water. Toilets? Outta the question! Their motto is pretty much: To party hard is the best revenge. Or, as Axl puts it: "We wanted to be the coolest, sexiest, meanest, nastiest, loudest, funniest band. There was a group consciousness of rape, pillage, search and destroy." LA loves them. "Guns N’Roses is like a living organism”, says Axl." It is not an act."

Guns have had several Wembley Stadium appearances. All the tickets for their first gig, in August '91, a month before the Use your Illusion album were even released, had sold out in record breaking time. To celebrate, a modest campaign was run in London which read: "Guns N' F____g Roses, Wembley F____g Stadium, Sold F____g Out!"

Slash was one of the two most famous Gunners as they were affectionately called in the mid-80s. Everyone knew how he liked to keep snakes and how he drank himself unconscious nearly every night and how he wore the top hat and how, amazingly, he’d been born in Stoke and how he could play the guitar like a bird could sing, and how he had a taste for the smack. Slash, you see, was the new Keef.

These guys were so REAL. They were living all their songs. Nightrain was some cheap liquor which the Gunnners had during their early days. Rocket Queens are what it is implied.The woman screaming in the background of the song is really a Rocket Queen. The guy, who was supposed to record the woman screaming, quit his job because Axl had asked him to record the whole show while Axl made her scream. That was the last thing he ever recorded for the Gunners.

Then there was ‘The Hellhouse’. A shabby place, where the band had put up during their pre Appetite for Destruction days. At that time they had very little money and they used to rob all the drunk and stoned females to get money for Nightrain. Izzy used to peddle drugs out of the Hellhouse, he even used to score for Aerosmith's Joe Perry. Slash and Steven Adlers were just outta control most of the time. Their crazy junking stories are too many to recount. The cops kept frequenting the Hellhouse. They had innumerous complaints. But after the Appetite for Destruction record they would just be asking the Gunners for their autographs.

Well, let’s talk about Mr. Brownstone. The band just kept dancing with him. There was this time when all the band was did was dance with Mr. Brownstone. But then they knew that they were either going to prison or going to die if they kept dancing. That is when some of these guys started cleaning up. Axl clearly told everyone, "No more dancin' with Mr. Brownstone".


Slash's turning point, in terms of smack, came just a few months later and, bizarrely, also involved a strange trip to Phoenix. Slash had followed Doug Goldstein (manager) to an exclusive luxury resort where he was vacationing and this is what Slash said. "This was when I was in my worst drug period - and actually what ended up getting me to clean up. [Doug is] on the golf course and all of a sudden the fuckin' police come looking for him saying, `We've got a naked guy in handcuffs. He assaulted a maid.'

"I'd smashed up my room, there was glass, I was all bloody. I'd showed up in Phoenix the night before. I'd done all [my drugs] and mentally had a trip-out scene. I took off running naked out of the shower - went through the glass shower windows. Ran out naked onto the resort, into one of the rooms, ran over this maid and kept running. It was a big scene." Narrowly avoiding arrest, he flew back to LA and checked into a hotel. "I passed out and woke up to what they call an 'intervention'. I ended up going for the first and only time to rehab, which lasted for all of about three days. I said, I'm not that fucked up. So I got out and took myself to Hawaii - on my own this time-and dried out. I've never had that serious a problem since then."

In sometime everyone was cleaning up, but Adlers. Slash said, "Izzy and I went through great pains to get our shit cleaned up [but] we never could fuckin' pull Steven back in, and we really tried. Axl never really liked Steven, so that was all the excuse he needed to fuckin' fire him."

Duff may have been smart enough to avoid smack, but over the next few years the combined effects of cocaine, weed and, most hazardously, alcohol would take its own heavy toll. At one point he was said to be putting away 20 bottles of wine a day. ("Somebody must have been counting, 'cos I certainly wasn't!" he says now, only half-joking.) This increasingly desperate situation only came to an end when his booze sodden pancreas burst one terrifying morning, a few weeks after his 30th birthday in 1994.

So who wants to dance now?

Introducing Mr.Brownstone

Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin' else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?

-Trainspotting

Play the Game.

The office Bulletin Board(BB) can give you kicks that one can hardly imagine. There are days when all official BB usage rules are broken and people go crazy posting messages. It is not a bullfight, it is just children fighting in a playground. Regular observation has shown that these fights are best enjoyed by the silent spectators. Or people who leave controversial one-liners and never return. The rest of the folks just keep fighting adding to the amusement of the tormentor.
Friday is obviously the best day to start such fights because no one enjoys working on Fridays. People tend to chill out. Ask any manager and he will tell you about the dip in efficiency curve of any employee as the weekend approaches.

All epic BB battles have a fixed life cycle.

1. Engage: Reply to any general comment. Your reply should be very stupid, reckless, baseless, ect ect……. Basically it should make everyone want to get back at you. The epic ones are very controversial indeed.

2. Deploy: If it is just one guy defending his statement then sooner or later the guy is gonna run for cover. People and I mean lots of them are gonna come down on him heavily. Smartness precedes defiance at some point of time and the guy just get back to work after a heavy thrashing. There are some battles like Ganguly-Chappel controversy, Khusbooo’s statement, Hindi/Tamil Supremacy, Sachin vs Lara, Ganguly Haters vs Lovers and the likes, which have just carried on for days. Message counts have reached 400 in some cases!

3. Phase out: This happens when every one just gets too tired of posting anything.
** Please do not assume that this is related to the person who started the controversy. He may have quit a long time back. Also, the posts from HR Managers listing the rules of BB usage and sometimes individual mails to the initiator/s asking them to remove their mail have been found to be effective.

Free Country Baby! and I wanted my own fight. So while coming to office today, me and a friend of mine, let’s call him S made arrangements to start a rigged BB war. We were just bored by our uneventful lives…..

I am posting few of the posts which we directed at each other. There were a multitude of posts in between which I am not gonna include (I respect the privacy laws of the company and the BB)
It all started off with this innocent query ………

S says :

Hi all,
Here’s a question for all Schumachers(hope I got the spelling right!!) of **********(deleted on purpose)!!!
I was driving down mount road the other day when the vehicle in front braked suddenly. Luckily, I was only at 60 and my brakes were in the pink of health!!!! I was also lucky for the fact that the vehicles behind me were able to brake in the nick of time.
Given this same scenario on a road like ECR where one often cruises at speeds in excess of 90 Kmph, what would be the best possible way to brake rapidly should something come in the way. I remember having read a tip on the same in the Times of India way back in the lates 90’s(in fact I was in school and didn’t know how to drive and therefore never really took the tip seriously!!!).
Now we have all had the all-to-frequent encounter with the odd cyclist or pedestrian who suddenly decides to cut across without even looking behind (personally I really don’t understand how people could have such terrible traffic sense. Even a nursery kid would tell you to look left and right before crossing). In fact it could even be a cow cutting across or just a vehicle whose driver decides to brake all of a sudden. In such a case what does one do. Do bear in mind that one could be traveling really fast and thus I am looking for a way to brake rapidly and safely. If anyone has any idea on how to do this it would be really helpful to all motorists who use ECR everyday

We had just taken two minutes to plan this event and now just look at this guy....
Anyways, I get to play the bad boy all the time. So here’s my reply. I took some time before sending this .... just worked up the BB crowd. Many unsuspecting folks had listed down lengthy responses to solve S’s dilemma befor my reply.

S,
You have a very intriguing question. There are a lot of ways in which you can act in such situations i.e. there are a lot of tricks you can pull out … but I guess everyone won’t be comfortable doing them. They might not have the time to pull out a magical stunt because you get little time in which you need to make a very crucial and bold decision.
So you should always go with you instincts because that is what comes naturally and it’s the most likely thing that you would do even if you know about all the tips.
So here goes ….
1. You should always try to save the pedestrian/animal/ect …. Just try to make sure there is no loss of life.
2. You can try pump braking …..swerving, normal brake + hand brake + turn.
3. But if you have traffic behind you and you are sure it will be a bigger accident if you brake ….. then just go full speed ahead(dogs and other small animals). Worst you can have is blood all over your car and a broken windscreen. You don’t wanna crash your car and three four cars behind you …believe me
4. If its human life then it is up to you what you decide, just be wise.

I am playing perfectly here. But I could have been more reckless and wanted to kill all the humans as well.
Nevertheless, when every thing is setup we go for the kill ..

S Says:
Hi all,
Jokes apart, I was asking for some tips here.
All you have done in your post is told me stuff I already know.
a) The main underlying reason for the mail was to save lives and that is why I asked for tips. So I already know that!!!
b) Well this is the only tip I see in the post. Pump breaking, etc.
c) It is this point that I find most disturbing. I am particularly uncomfortable with ‘Worst you can have is blood all over your car and a broken windscreen.’ For starters that is precisely what I don’t want. Secondly you speak of blood as though it’s a game of DOOM II. The statement kind of gives an impression of a lack of value and respect for human life. I would appreciate it if we refrain from making such statements especially in a public forum like this.

My comeback after this is totally brilliant. Basic idea is to get into the skin of every animal lover and hurt their ego.

S,
I don’t think it is fair that you have become so emotional. I know blood is kind of scary for the weak at heart but sometimes you just gotta do things…….

After this we just keep having fun at random.

S Says:
Hi,
I don’t really appreciate personal attacks on a public forum such as this.
You mention blood as though you have seen bloodshed like the great Alexander himself.
I am the last one to get emotional. I wrote the last point keeping in mind the collective sentiment of all the people who frequent this folder. I am sure most of them wouldn’t prefer the sight of blood if they could help it.
As for the weak hearted bit- we can have a little personal whos-gotta-stronger-heart contest if u wish!!!

By this time every thing is pretty hot and happening in the BB. The party had just started. I am getting a lot of personal mails from people who want to be dog-killers. I am their chosen one and they will support me in whatever I am saying.
My next reply(couldn’t just stop laughing when I wrote this):

S,
I really appreciate what you are saying but please consider being less theatrical (Ref: DOOM2 and Alexander).
And …. the need of bloodshed may only arise when the need be (Read: when you cannot help it)
As for whos-gotta-stronger-heart contest I just got one word ........ Anytime!!
(I always kick aaaaaaah at DOOM2)

Now this has become too much for the BB to handle and both of us get this official mail from HR asking us stop saying all this on the BB and delete our posts to uncomplicate things. End of story, for both of us but the BB battle keeps going on and on and on. It is like this wild fire and would burn everything in sight.

I go back to my usual coding and take intermittent breaks to have a slice of the cake I had baked. After a while people had started discussing the advantages of ABS, airbags and I know not what.
So it wasn’t it a freaky Friday?? What do ya think?

Pandora .... the free and fast Internet Radio

I had written about the importance of the Radio for people who stone and the generation that was obsessed with the concept of radio.

The concept is in itself is fairly simple. It breeds laziness and everything that we can attribute to heighten the lazy effect. “You don’t need to think about what music you should listen to…. And it should always be new and good music…”
Winamp, MP3 and CD’s will just lose out if we ever have good radio.

Read this previous post for more details.

The objective of today’s post is something else. Most of you must have used the Yahoo Radio, which comes with Yahoo Messenger. I just loved it.

But the internet just keeps throwing newer and better things at you.

Pandora ….. lets you listen to music that you like and also helps you find great music that you have not heard before. One more thing …. it doesn’t have the irritating commercials in-between tracks like Yahoo. I have been using it for more than two weeks now and find it better than Yahoo Radio.

It is free as of now. All that you need to do is register. You need not install any client on your system and the streaming is uninterrupted even on a slow internet connection!

Check out Pandora and the Music Genome Project, here.

The SoulFinders

People talk so much shit when they are stoned .......fortunately for me I have always been on the receiving end of the conversation .....and over the years I have started to follow the leaders of men in their pursuits to free the world and reestablish the order of peace and green that was once the way of life on this planet.

Of all the things that can ever get you confused, the super stoned effect is something very incomprehensible......
The pursuit for the END is obviously is something all stoners can relate to but something more has been confusing me for sometime..... Obviously the super stoned effect contributes a lot towards it, but that is not what has been driving me all along. Death is surely the most peaceful memory one can have and being stoned and falling all the time is something that shows you something similar. Everything becomes quiet and you can really see your whole life in a flash. Never question the Lord ‘cause he is the one who can save us from all our sins, and the visions are transmissions from the Lord Himself.
There is still something that keeps all of us from dying peacefully. All our sins, doesn’t matter how big or small they are do keep coming up, and the only thing we do is repent. Searching your soul may not be that elusive after all.
The human mind is more fragile than any other part in the body...including Omang's favourite. Everything we have ever done or thought about has a link somewhere in the mind. Keep forgetting all trivial details to remember the only truth in life and people call you a shitty pot-head with brain damage. Live your life by doing what everyone else does and you will always be loved. There is no cure to this disease...of living someone else's dream be it Jesus or Mohammed or whoever..........

Religion is something that has been more and more confusing as I have grown up. Everything has a law laid down and all the scum in this planet stuff it up their throat. They believe it so much that you can't talk sense to them. They have a reason for frigging everything. Where is the freedom that God gave us, why can’t we start our own religion? Why can’t every man have his own religion? Is this what we had all wanted to be?

"Free men!… Choose you destiny!!" Is what I would say to everyone who takes a bow. Not the usual destiny that everyone has.... you can choose to be anything ...doesn’t mean that you will choose to be what looks like the obvious destiny for you. It can be anything that keeps you unified with your spirit. I have the spirit of a farmer. The countryside is what keeps me happy. The sky is never as beautiful in the cities.
How I wish I had this power.... to make free men of everyone. Unfortunately, all the magic in this world is already used up for all the wicked whims of old kings and knights. But still this land had been devastated by the Plague. Everywhere the Plague has kept its marks. Everyone is running after the same thing, money, money, money and somewhere down in the list there is this vague mention of peace, with a side note which says for the future. All the people affected by this Plague are somehow always going to find peace and tranquility to be elusive.

The only people I can somehow identify to what I would want to be are the ‘Sadhus’. But they are all driven by a very strong sense of religion and all the complications that come along with it. But their essence is what I am talking about...the ancient ones...... Meditation is something that really shows us the way and gives us free direction.

But because of this Plague nothing seems to help people, they always come up with the same thing that is always there. All our thoughts are programmed; we always follow the herd or lead it. We can’t see any other way to the problem. If you think something else then you will be talking to your mind and send to an asylum.

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately and out of the host of theories I keep hitting upon, this one makes more sense than anything.
Now, we all agree that the mind is a very powerful weapon [we only use 2-3% , Einstein must have used 3%]. Somehow in ancient times people must have realized this truth and discovered how dangerous the mind can be if not put in control. So what they build is this society of rules and religion and order and everything else, which will constrict the mind from expanding. And maybe this worked for them, and we all started thinking similarly. With the mind given such a strict definition everything returned from chaos to perfect order. But with this great gift what we sacrificed was our freedom. The decision of the ancient man to live in society(closely represented by all the animals) is the historical reference that you can date this to.

My friend peace is ever elusive now and the only happiness that I can ever get is through my regular dose of pot. So, maybe if you ever want to be happy, might as well join the movement.

Where do we go from here?

IT bashing is something that I hate to do. My opinion about IT is not formed on how I had initially felt about it, but more so because I do not want to hurt the sentiments of people who have been associated with this industry for such a long time and really find peace in everything that they are involved in. On more occasions than one, I have publicly spoken in Toastmaster meetings and some other formal/informal organizational events that keep happening in our DC about the effects of IT. It had always led to an inevitable episode of IT bashing, which by no means had been the intention in having any of these events. Though I always tried to keep my opinions unbiased and purely factual, many people did became emotionally agitated, and I am still to find peace with them.

Is IT the pampered baby of the Indian Industry? Well, not exactly. There’s no denying all the good things IT has done for the country and obviously, the people. But an IT job is not as far fetched as perceived by the people who are totally dumb about IT or rather, the way this industry works. There is actually a whole generation of people who takes pride in glorifying an IT job that employs their sons, daughters, grandchildren, nephews, nieces and all other relationships that could be established from a family tree. The free advertising (call it the same news paper stand, if you will) that IT gets in this country is unbelievable!

Most people just fall in love with their IT jobs in a couple of years that is, if they had not already found love for it. The pay is good compared to most other jobs found in India, ordinary people respect you for working in Infosys, TCS, Wipro, CTS .... etc., they are hot in the Indian marriage market. Life could never have been better. You keep hearing that IT is where the brains of this country land up. The Government seems to love IT and so does the media. People, fresh out of college just go crazy looking for a job in a big Indian IT firm (please don't take offence as I am generalizing). It is the hallowed ground to stand on. So after you have got an IT job, what more can you possibly ask for?

What can you possibly say about a profession that is loved by the whole country? It all may sound like a devilish ploy but there are a lot of things that I do not dig about IT. In India the major chunk of IT work deals with solutions and services. It’s true that we are venturing into consulting and the likes but there’s no denying that it is a service-oriented industry. There is no real development work happening in any of the big IT firms. It makes me wonder, should we ever forget what happened to IBM, Accenture or the other IT solution/service providers in the US. People were out of jobs, thanks to outsourcing! So what?... you may ask. It will never happen to India, even when this IT wave hits China, which can obviously deliver at lower costs and has enough resources to support a blooming IT industry. Indian IT companies do foresee all this, and will act when its time. Already, Indian firms have started expanding in China with Infosys leading the way, which as a matter of fact is something that I think is a very smart thing to do.

The people employed in the big IT organizations are the best brains in this country. Cream ...... is not the only word, but it is the first one that comes to mind. I am just saying they are the 'best brains' because most of them are engineers from the reputed colleges of our country with a strong academic qualification. Students from mechanical, civil, chemical, electrical ......etc, ect are all recruited heavily by the IT industry. The students themselves are very happy to find an IT job. This brings me to one of the finer points of my discussion.... what were they doing for four years in their respective fields when all they wanted to do was comps? Wasn't there any higher calling? Why should anyone waste four precious years learning something that you are never going to put to actual practice?

With a title as enterprising as a software engineer, and a visiting card of your own to establish the claim, no one seems to be bothered. Lets look at the most deprived lot in IT, the software engineers. This is the title most organizations bestow their fresh recruits with. This cluster of software engineers has grown now more than ever before. Organizations like TCS[59k], Infy[48k] boasts of employee strengths in the range of 50k, others like IBM, Wipro, Satyam, ect are ramping up very fast. The majority of this recruiting is for software engineers whose plight has become more pronounced than ever before. The fate of people who have joined IT say 6-7 years back cannot be replicated now. The fast growth track they were on and the benefits they reap now as being project managers with company stock options and other benefits can hardly be achieved by the current lot of SE's in the same amount of time.

A software engineer at the core of their heart knows a few things about his/her job. The salary hikes and perks are no longer satisfying. Onsite opportunities are hard to get, because projects want to keep their operating margins high by playing with the onsite-offshore ratio. Growth is just a term you just keep waiting to see for real. An appraisal is just another mean to increase the competition among co-workers. Some companies even forbid their employees from sharing salary related information. Unrealistic timelines for critical deliverables are mundane. The work is as intelligent or requires as much innovation as the services industry requires. The truth is, that if we set our mind to services and keep working at it then there will never be dearth of opportunities in finding more service related work. As long as people do development and research they will need services. The service industry is here to stay and not going anywhere. The question is, do we, as Indians prefer this industry? The way I see it, we cannot shape the youth and the future of this country to new heights if we keep toiling in the services sector. New heights can only be achieved by innovation and leadership. For this to happen we need a conducive environment which encourages it and not one which glorifies a profession that smells of mediocrity.

But that's hardly a reason to change your job profile, isn’t it?
Then think about the effects if you have not considered them till now. Effects that are really going to hurt as you grow old. The reasons why you made all the sacrifices while at the job will always elude you. Unimaginably high stress levels, bad food habits, inadequate sleep are all gonna take a heavy toll as we grow older. Already you can see many people around you having the dreaded IT 'ponch', bald heads, back pains, severe migraines.....etc, ect. To add to this, they have very little social or family life. I know of an instance where a lady went to deliver from office. Suicides, heart attacks, strokes are all on the increase. All the talk about work-personal life balance sounds promising only in management talks. The ground realities are really very different.

So really, where do go from here? The only bit of advice I have for everyone is to start thinking now, because if you are at this job for more than two-three years then you are never gonna get out of it. Just ask yourself is this what I have dreamt of doing while growing up? And more importantly, do I love doing what I am doing? If you indeed love this job then the options are aplenty. But if you are at the other end of the rainbow, then might wanna use your illusion for once!

D-Company

Watched the movie, D-Company on another uneventful Sunday night or rather, a Monday morning. Whatever the time was, I don't have any intension of keeping any track. I don't count my days till the unexpected weekend. A week just has two days for me ....Monday through Friday and Friday night to Monday morning. This has become the most significant way to classify time, now. Monday till Friday is like an uninterrupted period of exaggerated pain. And, the rest of the week is the deserving halcyon. The common ingredient however, is the lack of appetite on all these days. In the first part of the week you don't get enough time to eat and in the weekend you don't feel like eating. Well, the only appetite I have now is to watch movies really late at night. Somehow I just feel that all the movies come to life only if u watch them in uncanny darkness and silence. Although it’s been repeatedly tested and proved that if you are high then any time is good.

The only outing I did this weekend was to get fluid for my Harley Zippo and pick up movies. Rest of the weekend I was happy playing improvised and extended solo to Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love. The luxury of having a friend who plays the chords while you can keep soloing is invaluable. There is a cover of Whole Lotta Love made by Slash, Dave Navarro and some other folks which is available for free download(video). All the guys go totally crazy on-stage in this live video and we did the same thing at home all weekend. Its an amazing video and the pain taken in downloading it will surely guarantee unlimited satisfaction.

Back to the movie review which I had planned to pen down.......
It has been a long time since I watched a Bollywood flick and picking up this gangster flick was the best thing that could have happened to me in the uncatalogued DVD shop. There could have been no movie more apt at a time when all the desi news channels are flooded with Abu Salem interrogation stories. People who have the phobia of keeping up with current headlines, let me tell you that Abu Salem, the main accused in 1992 Mumbai blasts and a major player in the Mumbai Underworld has been brought to India for questioning. CBI says that Salem seems to be co-operating with them in revealing necessary details.

As for the movie D-Company, it is made by Ram Gopal Verma and follows in the footprints of Satya and Company. This movie is supposedly a prequel to Company. But what makes this movie stand out is that people can relate to it as it doesn’t glorify the underworld. 'D' is supposed to refer to Dawood Ibrahim, but Ramu seems to disagree. Whatever he says, the link that both Dawood and 'Deshu', the actual D in the flick, used to work in Dubai .... landed up in India ...got harassed by the cops ....joined the underworld and has a similar story going forward in their life is very obvious.
One of the things that impressed me in the movie is the pace at which things keep happening. The acting debut by Randeep Hooda, is no doubt commendable. The portrayal of a disillusioned common man and his transition into a mature 'bhai' who is focused on his business and not scared of anything is done neatly. If you keenly observe and think over it, you will find that 'Deshu' speaks the least in the movie but has more impact than anyone else. You can actually feel the cool head and smartness that the real 'D' might have had when he did business. Other things I liked in the movie are the narration and dialogues.

Bottom line : [translated from Hindi, won't sound as smart though] "In business, a friend is an enemy!"
My rating: 9/10 [Bollywood]
If the underworld fascinates you then this a movie you might not want to miss! Check here for detailed reviews.

Makes we wonder, when would my time come to lead the herd? Or rather, not be part of any herd but be the only tiger in the jungle?

Self Appraisal

Found this post on an advertising blog .... check out this link, its worth taking a look.

A small story on self Appraisal, Enjoy it! A little boy went
into a drug store, reached for a soda carton and pulled it over to the
telephone. He climbed onto the carton so that he could reach the buttons on the phone and proceeded to punch in seven digits.The store-owner observed and listened to the conversation:

The boy asked, "Lady, Can you give me the job of
cutting your lawn?" The woman replied, "I already have someone to cut my lawn.""Lady, I will cut your lawn for half the price of the person who cuts your lawn now." replied the boy. The woman responded that she was very satisfied with the person who was presently cutting her lawn.

The little boy found more perseverance and offered, "Lady, I'll even sweep your curb and your sidewalk, so on Sunday you will have the prettiest lawn in all of North Palm Beach,Florida."Again the woman answered in the negative. With a smile on his face, the little boy replaced the receiver.

The store-owner, who was listening to all this, walked over to the boy and said, "Son... I like your attitude; I like that positive spirit and would like to offer you a job."The little boy replied, "No
thanks, I was just checking my performance and the job I already have. I am the one who is working for that lady, I was talking to !"

Credits: Abi

Who's going to Hell ?

Another round of absolute gibberish which only the enlightened is allowed to witness occurred last night. An idle mind is often the devil's workshop, and how true it is! Indeed, the Devil Himself would have been pleased to discover that so many souls are going to add to the mayhem in Hell in the near future. This amazing passtime of building up on complete shit and the unworldly talent required to keep up with the spontaneous nonsense coming out my own mouth is nothing more than extra-ordinary. I pity the people who are on the receiving end, and made to part with their precious hours of sleep just to introspect and find out if they will ever go to heaven after Death.

The eternally elusive question of every human soul ..... what is their fate in death? Do all our sins overweigh the good things that we have done/assumed that we have done? There is no simple answer to questions as complicated as these and all I can say like a wise soul is that we should never be directed by the end. Spread the happiness all around and maybe someday you will find salvation. Well, so much for all the metaphysical crap! The truth, my dear friend is that I am not going to Heaven and neither are you, so just quit all your high hopes! The sooner you realize this, the happier you are going to be. A totally different world awaits us if you ever accept this. So, say bye-bye to all your dreams of sitting pretty on clouds and chucking rotten apples on the poor souls who toil hard in the labyrinths of Hell.

Ever wondered who else is gonna be in Hell to party with? Well, its sure to have more celebrities than Heaven. But obviously for this to happen, the keepers at the Gates of Heaven should't let people pass if they are celebs. Anyways, it wouldn't make much of a difference, even if they are past the gate, God is sure to find out the rotten ones and throw them down.
Slash and Axl Rose, the ultimate bad boys of Rock n' Roll are sure to be there in Hell. For all I know, everyone from Gn'R will be there, so will Metallica, Deep Purple, AC/DC, Pantera, Ozzy Osburne ..... well, any major rock act of the century who's worth a penny is sure to be there. All the rappers Diddy, Snoop, Jay-Z, 50, The Game and all their brothers are also headed for Hell. Did I mention the groupies, band-aids and hoes who get featured the videos? Everyone famous from every sphere in life is sure to make it to hell. So why worry?

As for me I am happy to party with Axl, Slash and dance with Mr.Brownstone!

The Royal Indian Enfield

One of the things the Britishers left for us to remember them by and one which no one regrets is The Royal Enfield. When you ride an Enfield you can feel the power between your legs and your heartbeat ringing with the engine. My first experiences with an Enfield dates a long time back when I was in school. I still remember my cousin flaunting his souped up bullet. At that time, the desire to grow up faster and identify with leather clad men and scanty clad women was maybe more than the bike itself, but still the Enfield remained the center of it all. Until one day, when I would pester him enough to make me an offer I couldn't refuse. He told me that he will let me take out the bike for a ride only if I can start it. I was only a lil boy then, 9th grader to be precise, but the passion for bikes, cars and anything that moved fast had already overwhelmed me. I was already racing on the streets on my friend's Yezdi. Not to mention that I never had a helmet or license. All the violent protests by mom were somehow curbed down by a silent glance over the front page of The Statesman and a chill nod by dad. Now, these cryptic signals always meant different things to different people and I always interpreted them to serve me better. So, there’s gonna be no dampening of spirits in this house!


Well, the Godfather like offer that I had received didn't take me too far though. I couldn’t start the bike even after toiling for a very long time and nearly got myself injured from the vicious back-kick in the kickstarting process. Obviously, I didn't know anything about the decompressor then, until my cousin explained all the funda. That seemed to be the end of it all. I had lost the wager. I kept my side of the promise and he seemed too happy to keep his. Riding the bullet was soon a distant dream.

It was not before I had grown a few inches taller and put on a little more meat and some breezy months had passed before I rode the bullet for the first time. The experience was different, but I enjoyed it. The power the bike packed and the single cylinder thud overwhelmed me more than anything else. I obviously mixed the gears and brakes because I was used to riding normal bikes. The one thing I felt sorry about is that I couldn't max up on the speed parameter as I was advised against it. But on later rides I did test the Bullet for everything else and I was always more than satisfied.
My encounter with the royal Enfield would some how stop as my cousin moved to a different city. It would not be until 2002 that I would re-unite with an Enfield again.
The story of how it happened is nothing less than an act from a Bollywood flick. I was in college at that time. My friend was planning to get a bike and we had decided that we will go to all the bike showrooms to check out the different bikes available. The result was a depressing endeavor where we had decided to buy something because there was nothing better in the Indian market. We had to finish off this shopping in one day and before paying up the dealer we decided to take a hike to discuss more about it. Like lost souls, we lit our fags and looked up at the sun aimlessly. And then, as if devised by God we chanced on a huge hoarding which had this amazing red bike in the foreground while the rider is washing his face in a stream under a clear blue sky and it says "Escape to a place .... where your bathtub comes with a sky roof". The bottom line ..... Thunderbird ... Escape. We were speechless for a while but the very next day we were in the Enfield showroom after bunking half a day of our regular classes finding out about the Tbird details.

The Tbird was one of first ones acquired in Manipal and I was lucky that for the first three months or more I did more kilometers on this bike than my friend did on his own bike. Many people actually thought it was my bike. Long road trips, escape at night just to test out the potential of the Tbird, passing out on the bike drunk and stoned, speeding down to the college block to be always the last ones entering the classroom, the one high speed crash, racing back to shelter just to beat the dreaded Manipal rain, score 'n back in a minute, were soon to be few of the many things that the Tbird did. The memories are as beautiful as it gets but one thing I had never realized till now is that while we had all the fun we always had the Tbird.

The memories with the Tbird have all but weakened but it had been a long time that I rode a Bullet or standard an Enfield. This misery was soon set to be over. Sometime ago a friend had come to our house for an extra long weekend and had got along his shiny new silver Bullet 5S. He was as proud of his bike as any Surd would be of an Enfield and was upto all kinds of stunts like throwing fire from the exhaust and the like. Anyways, he was fascinated by my bike and I was by his bike. Also, he let me do as much testing I could on his new Bullet. We even raced like crazy on the ECR Highway cris-crossing each other at more than 100 all the way up and down till the toll bridge, but, that’s story a different story.
I don't want to compare the Tbird and a Bullet, they are two completely different bikes and there is lot of difference in the way each of them rides and handles. I like both. However, this ride with Surdy kind of stirred up the lost soul in me that's been sitting idle, patient and intelligent in the office cubicle for more than a year now. Surdy is planning to go for a road trip to Leh-Ladakh, through the highest motorable pass in the world, Khardungla and has urged me join him as well. He promised that the trip will be awesome, through the cold deserts with nothing to appreciate but nature's beauty and peace. Sounds like my kindda deal, how could I have not accepted ?!

Let's hope we make that trip before I grow too old for adventure! The bullet or any other Enfield is best enjoyed when you just cruise on it and let the bike take you where it wants to go rather than take the bike where you want to go. Cruising on the bullet, I did close my eyes for sometime to let my mind wander away from everything that been happening all around, and I felt more secure and happy than I have done for sometime now.

All good things come to an end......

The question is where does it end? Be it the last drop of gas in your oil tank, the last hundred bucks till the end of the month, the last fag in a twenty's cigarette pack, the last ironed shirt in your cupboard, the last one for the road?? These days I am just going totally psycho. Come to office early morning and start listening to the heaviest of metal. Iron Maiden, Megadeth, Pantera, Korn and Marlin Manson are all on my play list. Call it the effects of staying up late night and playing Warcraft against 3 Insane comps.

The Undead have risen and now there's no turning back. Ha ha haaa.....

But that’s not the reason for this chanced upon thought. There is something else that's been bothering me. Maybe it was always there and I never realised but the truth is, I know better now. So where does all the good things that we find in life end? Does it ever end? For me it keeps ending sooner that I would want it to. But, how can it be helped? Can you ever plan it? Well no one can, so maybe it is better that it's over and you are always left a pauper and start fending for yourself all over again. There are two kinds of people I have seen. People who plan for everything and people who don't plan at all. As you would all agree, it is always true that most plans never work. And so we are led into the vicious circle where the ones who had planned start falling out of track and the ones who never planned, start planning when they run out of options.

And so, do we now dream in black and white? to save us from ourselves ….

Great Indian Rock 2006

Got this invitation mail from Rock Street Journal for the Great Indian Rock2006.


Last date for entries for GIR 2006 is 10th December 2005.
Send your entries to RSJ, 86/1 First Floor,Shapurjat, New Delhi - 110049
Phones: +91 11 26497944 & 26497945.
The main festival is 18, 19, 20 February at Hamsadhwani, Pragati Maidan, New Delhi.
3 International bands are playing at GIR 2006.
Information updates will be posted on rsjonline shortly

Now, the only job is to get a band together!

Football Crazy?

I need to pay a lot of tribute to the game that keeps me busy though the weekend, mid-week and any other time I switch on the TV. When all your friends are as football crazy as you are and support rivals teams, then there is just no more looking at anything else or for that matter, talking. I remember my days in Manipal, when we used to sneak out of the hostels at night to watch every important Champion's League Fixture on the big screen at Pit-Stop. And every time I would be surprised to find the place crowded like anything in the middle of the night. Most of the guys would be in their soccer shirts, only breaking the silence of the night when there is a bad decision, bad foul or Goal! Live matches are something that the football followers cannot just do without. So many times, we would have exams the next morning but still, guys will just watch football and do a heroic night out or else, watch football and bunk the exam. I have been on both sides of this raw deal and always have had good justification for my actions.

The derby matches or the big ones like ManU-Arsenal-Chelsea matches or Real-Barca-Valencia are the ones where real emotions get erupted. Your good friends just cease to exist, if they are not on the same side. The pre-match and post-match periods are more about bragging - about players, old stats, history of the club, or taking the other guy's ass for supporting such a bunch of losers! When you end up losing, then it’s a different game, you just gotta play it out smooth and put the blame on a bad decision or stupid mistakes or a side depleted by injury. If nothing makes sense then try using, "It was just a bad day!" or "Cheap team! Cheap Goal!" or "Lucky bastards!" and the likes ....

The best season for the football fan is obviously the football season. But the rest of the year is just no time to hibernate. The likely deals in the transfer markets, the football gossip, new formations and strategies are things that always need more opinions. The football fever is just like any other viral fever and always stays with you till the season ends. The rest of the world just seems to help the fans do what they want. The tabloids just keep printing gossip and likely transfer deals that no one other than the fans would believe. The merchandise which is just official replica keeps getting more and more expensive. Nike and Adidas keep boosting their sales. Vodafone, O2, Tiger Beer, Emirates, Carlsberg, Sony, Reebok, T-Mobile and the gang join the party. A few managers are sacked or are bought like every other player, scout, coach and physio in the game. The English crowd gets ready to be more rowdy than the last season and the local pubs stock up more beer than they did last time around. But if you are all football at heart, then you would just not think about all this and be happy to wear you Live Strong band, football shirt, sing the club song and enjoy the ride.

Players become superstars, or superstars become more famous in every match and ESPN-Sky sports and their commentators do their best to keep you updated with the information round the clock. Keeps you inflicted with the football fever is what I would like to call it. Seriously, there is no escape. The only prescribed remedy is the cause of the disease itself. Football following is just never gonna go down. Though this theory has never been tested on any real subjects nor is it convincing enough to work but a very bleak chance of curing this disease lies with the clubs itself. When your club starts losing to the minnows, big teams and anyone placed between them, and you can no longer feel confident enough to support your club in public, you might just stop watching football for sometime. But, as I said before this is rather unconvincing, even I don't think it is practical enough to work. New seasons will always bring in new hope and fans unlike so many other people in this world are just loyal enough to lay low for one season.

So what can someone do when they are diagnosed with football fever, I guess nothing. Come to office on Wednesdays and Thursdays looking totally stressed out by last nights drinking exploits, when all they did was watched late night football? He he [canned laughter] .... that’s not even the tip of the ice-berg, you might not have hit an ice-berg for all that I know. Some time last year, ManU had a Champions League match-up in which Wayne Ronney was gonna make his CL debut. The electricity had gone off before the match started, but that could have hardly held us back from watching. Me and my crazy friend skimmed the streets of Bangalore and ended up watching the match in a Hospital (open round the clock, ain't it smart?). Ronney scored a hat-trick on debut and that’s the only reason I remember this particular match. The other crazy exploits cannot even be counted and I am not making any effort.

And for now, I salute all the true football fans!

Cheating Proxies and Firewalls

Got this info from a forward ...

Check out this link : http://www2.meebo.com/
This link helps you in logging to different messengers like Yahoo, AOL, MSN, GTalk through Web Browser.

This can be helpful for all those who are not able to login to different messengers in their office.

Just Let Him Be

You reach office early morning, like everyday. Start surfing the net like every other day then, start checking your mails and then the Bulletin Board. This is where I got really upset today. People just won't stop talking about Sourav Ganguly. What is wrong with them, why can't they just get a life? And now there is this Ganguly hate site, which has actually induced me to post this. Otherwise, I am generally very reserved about the Ganguly debacle.
This hate site is just such a big shame!

It just goes to show how jobless people really are. I personally have a lot of respect for Ganguly and there's no hiding this fact. I think he is the most elegant player in Indian cricket. I would even pay to watch an Indian cricket match just to see Ganguly playing his elegant shots.
The guy just scored a good hundred in a Duleep Match to prove that he is still good enough for the Indian team. Read the review here and please give him a break.
Ganguly keeps getting abused by everyone and now it has become a big national pass-time. This really has to stop! Guess, dada will soon show them how to clear the boundary in style.
Check similar views by Venkat on Ganguly here.

Walking the fine line between Pagan and Christianity

Pa·gan

noun.
One who is not a Christian, Muslim, or Jew, especially a worshiper of a polytheistic religion.
One who has no religion.
A non-Christian.
A hedonist.
A Neo-Pagan.

Two very important things have happened over the weekend, which I had consciously failed to observe. The blog counter showed that more than 100 people have clicked on Acid Nirvana. And, the empty beer bottles lined up in my house found their 50th friend. Actually, the current count is 57 and growing, even as I speak. The other thing and the more important of the two things is that, I have realized that there are things I don't believe in anymore. Also, there are more things that I don't believe in than ones that I actually believe. Anyway, there is a very fine line between them which made me borrow this exclusive title from Steeve Vai.

My faith is shaken, and remain shaken for no good reason that I can cite. I really don't know what to believe and what not to believe in. Things are really not what they seem. There are smiles all around, but no real happiness. Is it the rain that makes me gloomy? The work? The darkness that shrouds me is not new. I have seen it this entertainment through and through and so has everyone. You have seen your birth, your life and death, you might recall all of the rest. Did you have a good world when
you died? Enough to base a movie on?

Are you still holding on to your faith ....
Do you believe in aliens? Or is your life and thoughts still ruled by TV? I know mine is. Everything that I am today is greatly influenced by what I have seen on TV. As insane as it might sound, the only thing that is real on TV are the cartoons. By real, I mean, not trying make you do something. Cartoons never sell anything, other than ideas. A psychoactive mind and cartoons are always an unavoidable situation. Call it Catch-22, if you like. We all are unconsciously aware that whatever happens in cartoons never happens in the real world. So you will never spend time thinking about it, that is, if you are over the age.

Every other channel out there is trying to prove its point. They have over the years started to influence everything that we do.
Kids will play sports that more people watch, not what they might be naturally good at. We buy stuff that we see on TV. 'Marketing' is not the only word but the first one that comes to mind. Another word that comes to mind is reality-index. Wondering what that means? Don't bother, I just coined it. The more that we see of something, this index value keeps increasing. All the claims start to make sense, acceptance creeps in.
There is no one to blame. The generations below us are more wary of this effect. All their faith is placed in TV.

As for my shaken faith ......

I don't have TV at home anymore!!

Tick-Tock

The events of the last few days have been nothing more than ordinary. There are really no reasons to recount them, other than prove to the near and dear ones that the consequences of the dreaded permanent/temporary memory loss no longer inflicts me. The reasons are pretty obvious.

But there are two things that happened, or rather three ….

Friday was full of surprise! It was 5:30 and I was restlessly waiting for my watch to tick-tock away to 6. What I got was a tring-trring and a founding member of HTTP on the other end. If you are wondering what HTTP stands for, then it means Hardly any Time To Practice. It’s the music band for Infosys, Chennai. The name itself is something that I am not very proud of, but it is very true that we hardly practice or get any time. I was called, because they wanted me to setup some patches on the guiatr processor for a show later that night. I had no idea that the guys would ask me to play with them and that too just half an hour before the show started. Well, they did in fact ask me and I obliged. It was good fun though. I had my own fan club (just 3 people) sitting in the first row, who started screaming Leelay! Leelay! before a very dazed and confused Infosys crowd.
But the best thing of the evening was a 20 minute special performance by Stephen Devasya, the fastest keyboard player in Asia. I have never seen anyone do so much with the keyboard. Stephen played three pieces, all of them had great melody and he played super fast. Good thing that we played before him!
The rest of the night was uneventful, we had a small party in our house and that’s it. Only thing is, we never wanted the party to end. As we urged someone from HTTP to drive back home safely, there were public requests all around and he started to play Coming back to Life on the empty dark and very silent street in front of our house. Everyone, fuel-ed by two beers each started singing for no specific reason. Don’t know if any of our neighbors got up. I guess they have already given up on us, after I played a solo with screaming feedback from my amp with the volume knob turned all the way up. Wait! There was no solo, only screaming feedback. Don’t know what people would have thought when they heard a woman screaming for more than twenty minutes, and that too on loudspeaker, guess you just have to use your own illusion to find out.

Ok! So that was Friday. Saturday starts the same way every time. I usually have a hangover and there is last night’s unfinished beer in the freezer. So its always …….

Got up in the morning and got myself a beer !

When everything can get delivered at home (Movies, Food, and very soon Booze) there is absolutely no need to stay in your senses. One good thing , I did was get a load of DVD’s to kill time till Sunday night. I did watch some very good movies and a few normal ones.

(The following movies were watched in the same order by which they are listed, this in turn, might have influenced the ratings on some of them)

Sin City – This is an awesome movie directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller with special guest Quentin Tarantino. The whole movie looks as if it’s out of a comic strip. So, if you love reading comics, or diligently watch all movies by Tarantino then this is definitely a movie to watch. There are three stories which are not interrelated in any way other than the fact that they all happen in the same city(Basin City). There are no heroes in Sin City, only villains. And some villains just happen to be a bit more heroic than others... but they're still pretty much villians. The cast is also awesome Jessica Alba, Devon Aoki, Benicio Del Toro, Josh Hartnett, Jaime King Michael Madsen, Brittany Murphy, Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke, Nick Stahl, Bruce Willis and Elijah Wood
The narration in the movie is totally trippy, and did I forget to mention that the movie is in Black and White!
I am definitely gonna write more about this movie again, the narration is just too much for any stoner (dosen’t matter if he is reformed). Till I get the original script, please keep yourself updated with the reviews in IMDB.
My Rating – 10/10


Flight Plan – This movie has a descent plot, good build up and definitely high quality acting by Jodie Foster. There are lots of flaws in the plot itself though, which gets noticed very easily and mark my words, there will be a lot of questions raised and assumptions made by the audience when the movie finally gets over. Overall verdict: Watch-able, Family Movie and Good acting.
My Rating – 6.5/10
Read the IMDB review here.

Goal! – This was another awesome movie, I saw. Whether you are crazy about football or not won’t make a difference here, but having a sound knowledge of how the scouts work and signings are made in football or any other game will help appreciate the move in a better way. And if your soul is football, then, it is one of the best movies you will see for some time to come. It has everything that is football – the making of a young superstar and his football lifestyle.

A poor Mexican guy’s struggle from the streets of Los Angles to Champions League glory in St. James Park, New Castle really does justice to the tagline for the movie -Every dream has a Beginning.

There are special appearances by lot of footballers including Alan Shearer, Beckham, Zidane, Raul, Dyer, Gerrad and many more…… The UK party scene is also covered, which nothing but increases the glamour index of the movie.
My Rating – 8.5/10
Read the IMDB review here.


Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Another trippy movie!
I had just put a extra film of precaution and mature-sense to watch this movie, I was just too intimidated by the effects of the book on people. My advice, please avoid any caution and watch it with an open mind (find out your own way of opening it!).
There are a lot of things about this movie that I want to write about but, at some other time. Till then Don’t Panic.

My Rating – 8 /10
Read the IMDB review here.

Corpse Bride – Didn’t finish watching this movie. Bad print. Will post a review later.

Guess Who – This is the movie I saw in the end. Sunday Night, 9 o clock, haven’t had any food for a long time and home delivery was taking more time than usual.
The movie was worth all the trouble, a proven formula for happiness. Romantic Comedy is something I could have done without, because the romantic part is not going down too well with me these days. The comedy was alright. It is a kind of movie which can be watched anytime, but only once.
It is a movie you can take your girlfriend out for and you can go alone only if you don’t get tickets for any other movie. I would have been very happy to watch this movie maybe a month back, but not anymore. It just reminded me of things that I don’t want to. So be advised.
The story line ….black girl gets white boy (Ashton Kutcher) to meet parents and announce engagement. But there is the girl's dad (Bernie Mac), big fat black guy, who obviously can’t trust a white guy…. and so the story goes on and ends like the way it is supposed to.

My Rating - 7.5 /10 ( If you are a girl, probably, you will rate it higher)
Read the IMDB review here.


So that’s about it ……that is all I did this weekend.

Did I miss out something......

Ohhh .......the third thing. Something Gill would have been proud of…..something that I shall refer in the future as the Lotus Pond Act a.k.a, re-christianed, Dublin Act. But for now please refrain from asking the coffee shop outside Dublin about five drunk guys who did the vanishing act!

My other best friends .... Guards, Waiters and Customer Support Executives

It all started with a very skinny guy called Tinkle. Now, don't ask me how he got the name, he was just too curious. He was the trivia man! Always had trivia rolled up his sleeves. Any quiz forum would have been proud to have him. So, how do people with so much trivia, acquire all the stuff they know or sometimes just bullshit about? Read on ...

Whenever we used to go out eating, Tinkle just had enough questions for the waiters to keep us occupied till the food actually comes. Maybe they always used to get us the food fast enough so that Tinkle has his mouth full. But he was a good guy, never used to throw bombs at the waiters ... All the questions were very answerable. More times than not it used to be about the food and the ingredients. But they always were very exhaustive, and included everything that was on the menu. Maybe, he was just too curious about Indian food. Can't complain! He had all his schooling in Dubai and was really making an effort to learn more and more about India.

But somewhere between all the questions there was enough spark to set me off. After that, we just started having fun. The questions could be from anywhere like Parnab's Anything Under the Sun Round. Don't ask me who is Parnab? He is different story all together, The Great Parnab Mukherjee - Porno, for everyone from Kolkata. The meanest Indian quizmaster. We were like Porno in a lot of ways. If the guy is nice and ass licker then he would just be spared after a few introductory rounds. But whenever someone tried to act over the edge, his happiness would be gone for the rest of the day. After a while, almost every waiter in Manipal knew us and we knew them. We even knew where they are from, how long they have been in Manipal, how on earth they landed here, what he thinks about his boss, about the students, about keeping customers happy .....it just keeps going on. Every place we went to were happy to give us something complimentary. But after sometime I just became very nice to all these people and would just talk to them about anything that comes to my mind. At times I have even had waiters giving me advise on the injurious effects of smoking.

This love didn't just go out to the waiters. It used to be random. One of the very best and obviously the oldest was the Kamath guy from 9th block JC. Everyday I would get there in real bad shape, with eyes all red, and keep asking him about milk shakes that he never made, until I ran out of names, or got too hungry to ask him anything else. Then there were all the MIT guards, I even remember some their names till now ??(Notice the question marks). For all the people who are aware of my memory prowess, I am not bullshitting, I do remember. But for the pagans, here goes ..... Abdul, the old grumpy 9th block guy, who spoke shit Hindi, and sounded marathi, but was from some nearby place and always used to say 'keela neich'. I knew the guards pretty well and even they knew me. Going out of the campus late nite for the usual visit to Shiva temple or Psychadelic tree/ Peacock point/ Jimi Hendrix point/ Star-gazers/ Timmy's house was never a problem. It was all super smooth.

The guards are people who you see everyday and even in my office I know most of them.
There is a very strange story about my office. Once I was walking around our office with someone, pretty high up, and lot people started acknowledging this guy. I was just amazed. How do you know so many people? He told me its because he has been around for so many(not to be very proud of) years. This happened when I was pretty new in this office.
Next time around, when we were walking, a lot of guards started doing whats up to me. Even this guy was amazed, and asked me how I knew all the guards. I gave him some modest bullshit. But, how does he even know that all the chocolates that come from onsite and are hijacked( I am very good at doing this, SMIT training) are freely distributed to all the guards. Even if I don't do that, the guards still know me because at many of the the fag-breaks I would spend time talking to them.

Fact about CHN-INFY guards: You will be amazed to know, many of them have served in the Army for more than 15 years and know how to speak Hindi pretty well!

My latest obsession, call centre executives. These guys are always too eager to please and you can just have a lot of fun with them. I keep changing my mind about these people, sometimes I take their trip badly and at other times I am just nice. Most of these people are very stupid, so the all the 'fun', is limited. But taking their trip is a good pastime. Somehow till now I have not had good bonding with any call centre people. Except the Airtel AskMeService, where only two people work in shifts and thats why they take long time to pick up the phone. One of the guys is Muskesh, and the other one is Bala. I don't know the other people. Anyway, they hardly pick up when I call.

Well all this is not the point, the point is, we meet these people almost everyday. We might even remember their face, whenever we see them, even outside their original job profile. But we hardly know any of them. They all are familiar strangers. My advice, always talk to everyone, however insignificant they seem to you, if you don't have anything to gain, then you don't have anything to lose as well. And maybe, in the process you will just be happier getting through your otherwise uneventful day.

Some other people whom I talk to a lot, sutta-shop guy, cable TV guy, watchman, maid, grocery shop owner, house caretaker ..............

Warcraft III - The Frozen Throne

Several months after the Burning Legion's defeat, the world is threatened by Arthas and his blazing desire to conquer the Frozen Throne of Icecrown and extend his iron fist world-wide. The remaining races are left to protect their own existence and defeat Arthas, wielder of the Frostmourne, leader of the Scourge.

Orcs, Humans, the Undead and the Elves. Did they ever rule this world? If you wants me to give you reasons, I cannot, but, there are thousands of people just like me who do believe in them. These people have their world defined by these races and live in a parallel universe of their own. They swear by their own race and never has good opinion about the other ones. What am I talking about? Well, it just a LAN game for the rest of the world, but, for the true warriors and specially people, who don't have anything better to do in life, its their only way of existence.

I remember once in MIT when I had first started playing Warcraft, I had really got hooked on to the game. For three days and three nights I had locked myself up in my room and just kept playing. When I came out of this self-imposed banishment, people in college really thought I had gone home on a holiday or something (obviously, I had to taken some rest after this compelling adventure by compensating it with extra long hours of sleep). I got attendance shortage that semester which I believe is somehow related to this. But I am not repenting. It did serve a good purpose. It gave me the purpose of spending my otherwise not so useful days, in peace and get involved in something that I really enjoyed doing.

And so it all began. I was the eternal Undead, raising skeleton soldiers from corpse, possessing unknown souls, casting spells, summoning spirits, summoning crypts, cannibalizing.... . It all seemed so true. Warcraft is a game which you just can't quit when you start playing on LAN. And for the next year or so, that is what I did. When you have people around you who are as jobless as you are and want get involved in the madness it becomes all the more fun. We just kept going at it all day and night, pushing all the limits of human patience, determination, and all other entities associated with long sleepless nights, with just the purpose of wiping out entire civilizations.

I am eternally indebted to Blizzard who made the game - Warcraft. I think the story line is fantastic. The game play is really smooth. The characters are all very real, the details to the texture and buildings are impeccable. The heroes leveling up to level 6 is the best thing that can ever happen to you. Some of the level 6 powers and their effects have become legends among WARriors (Warcraft freaks). But Warcraft III is all about: strategy. More specifically, it is a game that requires quickness, skill and micromanagement for all units. Even one frail step taken into the wilderness of dull-minded actions can result in an immediate loss. Warcraft III is not the same as Starcraft, or Age of Empires. Funding resources are quite scarce in comparison to those in other games. The introduction of campaign heroes was critical. These were the winds that turned the tides of the 'sea'. Players had to increase the levels of these special characters, equip them with artifacts dropped by creeps, and guide their groups of units throughout the game maps in order to expect any sort of success.

Ok! No more of what happens inside the game, but these are credits that I really think Blizzard deserves. The outside world for WARriors are just as normal as for everyone else. But things they talk about (and, all the talk is very passionate!) can hardly be understood by anyone. Outsiders have so often got pissed at dinners, coffee tables, sutta shops, bars & pubs and generally any other place and time when we start talking about Warcraft, the might of our own race, their heroes , our game win/loss count and all other sumptuous details, that living in our own WAR world was the best thing we could do.
Night-out before exams always meant fag and grub break for everyone else. We always opted for Warcraft break. And it is addictive like hell.

“One more game ! C’mon“ is the least you can say, if you have not already abused the other guy enough to have your re-match.

The game has given us a lot of things as well. Finally, long hours of practice did pay. That too literally! We won gaming championships arranged by IEEE. The effect(very normal) -15 totally drunk MITans. But there was more pride in it that anything else, of all the people we defeated, there were Koreans gamers (best in the world and born with Nintendo Gameboys).

Yes babyz, we kicked international ass!

And then it just stopped somewhere or faded away, because college got over and single player mode was too boring, if you don’t not want to sharpen your strategy, or find new tricks to use in your next game.
But WARing is something that i really look forward to doing, anytime! I read in a survey somewhere that Warcraft is the most played game for the age group of 23 – 26.Which means,

I have three more years of the WARring left!

More on this yet to come, so if you ppl want me to stop bugging you about Warcraft then plz put in ur comments.

The Radio - An Orbit that Rocks

A very long time ago I had read a short story by Salman Rushdie called the radio. It was black humor at its best. Though my fragile mind has only but a thin impression left of the actual story, but it was something like this. The setting was post independence and there was some government offer of a radio, to anyone, who got vasectomy done (to get the population issue under control). Some peasant, really frustrated with life, decides to get sterilized and gets the radio. But after a while, he repents the loss and wants to return the radio, which obviously is not possible. I don't remember what happens exactly but something in those lines. It is a very compelling story but does make you think. How can a radio be so important?

Unfortunately, till recently, in India, we never had any station totally devoted to playing rock and roll. Now, the radio as we all know started out as a big statement of freedom. The vinyl just keeps getting swapped and you get to listen to all the great songs by all the bands. You don't need to think, the radio just does all the thinking for you and gives you a good song every single time. All you need to do is ... stone and listen. What could have been more important to the flower generation?

This trend just kept rolling into their kids and the next generation. With the music on TV being just as good as my paycheck and the computer screen just as nasty to be avoided till 9 A.M. what can a normal guy turn to for his regular dose of music. Making a choice is something I just hate doing in life, so CD's and Mp3's are definitely out. So how do I quench my thirst for music?

Listen to the rhyme as it fliiiies though the sky
As it fliiies through the sky
Okkkkkk .... Take me there !!

This is an ‘ad’ that features in Radio Voyager. Voyager is a alternative music station that plays all the new songs that come out, alternative numbers from the past and some times little bit of classic rock. But the mood is typically alternative. They keep pissing me off with some RnB stuff they have started playing these days but you can tolerate it once in a while, if you really want or to tired of changing stations.

Then there is the main attraction, the star of the day, the savior of all beer drinkers and hell raisers!

Orbit Orbit Orbit Orbit Rock !

Orbit Rock just plays everything from Aerosmith to Audioslave, from Van Halen to Van Morrison, from Led Zeppelin to Lynnard Skynard, from Grateful Dead to Guns n' Roses. All classic rock from 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's is featured on this station and is my personal favorite.

For sometime the radio has been my only source of entertainment and the only thing in life that is real for sure. The music is never over. The bands just keep playing. I just keep smoking. Like so many things in life I had just taken this music for granted, but you can really feel how much you need it when its not there. The name itself is such a big metaphor. Keeps you in your orbit? Only time will tell .....But the radio is something that is always gonna live on as long as there are people who listen to it.
The only device of the past to inspire people and their lifestyle will never die…….

The mother of all analogies - Part I

I have always believed that the human brain has unexplored capabilities. For a software engineer in Band B and still unconfirmed (attributed by the strong desire for living on the edge), life is just as insecure and stagnant as it can be. All I get to hear is "its all your own doing ...... you gotta change your crazy ways....." .Imagine the look on Steve Tyler's face when someone tell him this (For the unimaginative please draw the inference from the last scene of Dude Looks like a Lady video .... Tyler blowing the bubble), thats exactly how I feel but I refrain from doing the look, just to uncomplicate things.

For people like me who are always afraid of the "shit time" i.e. time away from office when you don't have anything else to do other than drink beer and get entangled in mindless debates and chit-chat, we found a better pass time.

Analogies, analogies and more analogies .......

And so it happened, one night when we were in the most melancholy mood and the collective frustration of the group of under-privileged MITans was at it boiling point. Everyone had their turn at violent IT bashing and explaining why their job sucks big time.

"Man, we just do shit! No brains involved! What was the point of being a comp engineer ?? Shitty work ... Shitty life .... Life is just a big shit-hole"

We all agreed we are just doing shit. And hence the alter-ego of a software engineer was established. As a shit-pot cleaner.
All the code that we maintain is just shit, not only because it doesn’t serve any big purpose but its also written some 5-10 years ago with no foresight for any change to be easily incorporated.
Every day we just get our shit-pots assigned when we reach office, that in layman terms are our daily tickets. Use harpic, scrub, rub rub all day and make it clean, that what we do all day. And all other mechanical problems associated with the pot like flush not working, water-leakage, drainage problems, ect ect are like minor/major enhancements.

We had so much laugh over this discovery of our actual job profiles that we even extended it to our small rendezvous (fag-break, lunch-break, ect ... ect.. if at all there are anymore)in office.

SE 1 :"Dude! What troubling you ?"
SE 2 :"Some pot in a fat lady's house ... its all messed up .. no clue how to fix it, never done anything like this before"
SE 1 :"Ha ha ha ... I just got to shine two pots today... will leave after that :))"

Even when your PM asks "Hows the works going on ?", you can smartly say "Looks like there's more to it than than meets the eye"

Dont know for how many days we kept on going with this stuff(we still do it ...though not as much as we used to). But you grow up at some point, don't you ? How can you not grow in an industry where its all about growth. Work becomes better and you gain more and more responsibilities.
Some people in our group did grow ... into floor cleaners. Now there's no disagreeing it's a better job than pot-cleaning, it even looks better on your resume.
"No more of smelling that shitty harpic dude, I just use Lizol now!"
Floor cleaners do get some respect. Everyone cleaning shit-pots dream of sweeping floors someday. But its a tough job you gotta work hard, there can't be any dirt left anywhere and then you need to shine it obviously.

There is no end to how much we dwindle into our Other job profile but it sure is better than IT bashing and keeping a sad face all the time.

Advice from people who have seen it all : The possibilities are just endless here and has very high reusability, try exploring the idea and you can fit it into any organizational structure that you can ever imagine.

** Disclaimer : The incidents reported here had happened a long long time ago and the author's views about his job has changed considerably, but the analogy is still something that keeps amusing him.

Life Sucks!

Read this post by an XLRI grad, who had worked in Chennai. His feelings kind of sums up the life, my friends and I from college have in this city.

Makes me echo "Life is always greener on the other side!"

Its a long way to the top .... If you wanna rock 'n roll !!

As is always said "rocking ain't no playing in the park" ....

The year : 1976
The Band : AC-DC
The Album :High Voltage
The Effect :Their national rock anthem 'It's a Long Way to the Top'

It is the perfect song to get charged up to before going for any rock concert.

Ridin' down the highway
Goin' to a show
Stop in all the by-ways
Playin rock 'n' roll

There has been multiple occasions when I had just heard the song and wanted to jam to it AC-DC style. But then again you will always remember,

I tell you folks
It's harder than it looks

It's a long way to the top
If you wanna rock 'n' roll

And the best piece of advice you can ever pick up from the song,

If you think it's easy doin' one night stands
Try playin' in a rock roll band

The song kind of sums up the way rock music was floating in the pub circuits of Australia and England in the 70's.
The crowd the bands played to was male, volatile and working class. They demanded to be deafened by bass, drums and guitar. It became known as Pub Rock - music to drink by.

The venues that make up the roll of honor in the great campaign became part of Hard Rock's own heroic mythology: Melbourne's Whitehorse Inn, Sydney's Bondi Lifesaver and Adelaide's Larg's Pier Hotel.

"They would be throwing beer cans and I thought 'just keep moving' and that's how it all started." - Angus Young

"Larg's Pier Hotel...it was a really rough pub. I used to go there when I lived in Elizabeth, when I was a bit younger, and we'd take acid and go there and watch the bouncers kill people, you know, just for entertainment. It was, like, frightening." - Jimmy Barnes

But not every band had a sense of rhythm strong enough to jerk the drinkers out of their stupor.
Everything about the band was defined by the way they were made to play in Australia. It was the ideal way to get prepared for the UK circuit and later the tours to America. No pub band was complete without its own exorcist out front goading the audience (Bon Scott did that perfectly) and crazy guitarists picking great riffs out nowhere and going crazy playing solos. You could see Angus Young doing a solo climbing all over his Marshall cabinets in a studio, just like he was on stage.
AC/DC always gave the crowd what they wanted, even starting an all-in brawl with English headliners Deep Purple at the last Sunbury in 1975.

It was always a complete show, the blinding lights, the piercing music, the school uniform, the demonic Gibson guitars, the attitude that was definitely rock and together they used to always emit this strong energy that would blow you twice over.

If you wanna be a star of stage and screen
Look out it's rough and mean

It didn’t make much sense to me when I heard it for the first time but then again thats the way AC-DC was born. The one greatest thing that I have got to know from all AC-DC concerts and shows (all on video, of course) is that its all about "the show that you put up" and "the energy you emit on stage" that keeps the audience chanting your name for generations to come.

In 1979 AC/DC made a successful foray across the Pacific. They were taking America in the same way they had taken the UK - live. Strong album sales followed. It seemed there was no limit to how far the Albert's success story might go. But on Monday, 18th February 1980 Bonn Scott left the party.

"It was the first time in his life that he felt he
was accomplishing something." - Angus Young

"It would have surprised me if he had have lived on." - Michael Browning

There could be no greater epitaph for Australian Hard Rock's success than AC/DC's machine rhythm, Angus Young's berserk warrior guitar and Bon's blood curdling battle cry! Lest we forget.
But always remember ...... it's indeed a long way to the top .....if you wanna rock n' roll !

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

Lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD, is a chemical that alters a user's mood, thoughts or perceptions. For this reason, LSD is grouped into a class of drugs known as hallucinogens or psychedelics. These drugs can cause auditory, visual or somatosensory hallucinations, paranoia or dream-like states.

LSD was first synthesized from a fungus that grows on rye and other grains. In 1938, Albert Hofmann working in the Swiss pharmaceutical company called Sandoz, produced LSD for the first time. He was hoping that this new drug could be used to stimulate circulation and respiration. However, the tests he conducted were all failures and he forgot about LSD for 5 years. In 1943, Hofmann accidentally ingested (or somehow absorbed) a bit of LSD and experienced some of the psychedelic effects of this chemical: dizziness, visual distortions and restlessness. A few days later he prepared 0.25 mg of LSD in water and drank it. He again experienced the mood and thought altering effects of LSD.

LSD, commonly referred to as "acid," is sold on the street in tablets, capsules, and, occasionally, liquid form. It is odorless, colorless, and has a slightly bitter taste and is usually taken by mouth. Often LSD is added to absorbent paper, such as blotter paper, and divided into small decorated squares, with each square representing one dose.

The Drug Enforcement Administration reports that the strength of LSD samples obtained currently from illicit sources ranges from 20 to 80 micrograms of LSD per dose. This is considerably less than the levels reported during the 1960s and early 1970s, when the dosage ranged from 100 to 200 micrograms, or higher, per unit.

Health Hazards

The effects of LSD are unpredictable. They depend on the amount taken; the user's personality, mood, and expectations; and the surroundings in which the drug is used. Usually, the user feels the first effects of the drug 30 to 90 minutes after taking it. The physical effects include dilated pupils, higher body temperature, increased heart rate and blood pressure, sweating, loss of appetite, sleeplessness, dry mouth, and tremors.

Sensations and feelings change much more dramatically than the physical signs. The user may feel several different emotions at once or swing rapidly from one emotion to another. If taken in a large enough dose, the drug produces delusions and visual hallucinations. The user's sense of time and self changes. Sensations may seem to "cross over," giving the user the feeling of hearing colors and seeing sounds. These changes can be frightening and can cause panic.

Users refer to their experience with LSD as a "trip" and to acute adverse reactions as a "bad trip." These experiences are long; typically they begin to clear after about 12 hours.

Some LSD users experience severe, terrifying thoughts and feelings, fear of losing control, fear of insanity and death, and despair while using LSD. Some fatal accidents have occurred during states of LSD intoxication.

Many LSD users experience flashbacks, recurrence of certain aspects of a person's experience, without the user having taken the drug again. A flashback occurs suddenly, often without warning, and may occur within a few days or more than a year after LSD use. Flashbacks usually occur in people who use hallucinogens chronically or have an underlying personality problem; however, otherwise healthy people who use LSD occasionally may also have flashbacks. Bad trips and flashbacks are only part of the risks of LSD use. LSD users may manifest relatively long-lasting psychoses, such as schizophrenia or severe depression. It is difficult to determine the extent and mechanism of the LSD involvement in these illnesses.

Most users of LSD voluntarily decrease or stop its use over time. LSD is not considered an addictive drug since it does not produce compulsive drug-seeking behavior, as do cocaine, amphetamine, heroin, alcohol, and nicotine. However, like many of the addictive drugs, LSD produces tolerance, so some users who take the drug repeatedly must take progressively higher doses to achieve the state of intoxication that they had previously achieved. This is an extremely dangerous practice, given the unpredictability of the drug.

Source : National Institute on Drug Abuse

Check these links for a set of nine drawings under the effects of LSD and the related psychological effects.

List of street names for the different variations of LSD.

Star Spangled Banner - Woodstock'1969 (Jimi Hendrix)

Since World War II the Star-Spangled Banner has become a permanent fixture at sports events in the United States. And over the last 30 years artists have gradually made non-traditional renditions of the song commonplace.

Frequency doesn't necessarily breed acceptance, however. While America may seem less surprised by new renditions of the national anthem, it still considers the song's performance a litmus test for patriotism.

Aug. 17, 1969

It wasn't a sports event, but it was controversial. During the final set of the historic Woodstock music festival Jimi Hendrix only 26 years old, let loose with a rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner on electric guitar that's been called everything from the most important political rock statement of the 1960s, to an afterthought caught in one of Hendrix's worst performances. It was his first gig since the breakup of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and all but 10% of the festival's 400,000 concert goers stayed for his Monday morning set. But there was no question the performance was controversial. Even today, music scholars can't agree on what message, if any, Hendrix's screaming guitar and ballistic feedback was trying to deliver.

The Americans plagued by the wars and immense mental torture of the past decade had just been doing more drugs than ever before and the only thing they wanted was peace. There were very few people left, who witnessed one of the greatest moments of their life when Hendrix suddenly started playing Star-Spangled Banner on the main stage at Woodstock'69, perhaps the most melancholy tune he ever played. The song itself was like an extended intro to Purple Haze, not very sure if Hendrix actually meant it to be that way, but this is what I have always felt when I watch the recordings.People were stunned, stoned and stupefied by the Hendrix experience.

For once, "legendary" really is the word. The performance by Jimi Hendrix and his band that closed Woodstock in 1969 has been cited as one of the highlights of the festival, of Hendrix's career, of the decade - you name it. His feedback-racked solo rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner was described by the rock critic of the New York Post as "the single greatest moment of the 1960s".

That this epoch-defining blast of sound was witnessed by a bleary-eyed fraction of the 800,000 who made it to Max Yasgur's farm in New York State seems to have burnished the legend. Due to a weekend of overruns, most had left by the time Hendrix arrived on stage nine hours late on the Monday morning. The movie Woodstock, which featured a 10-minute segment from a set lasting nearly two hours, is all most of us have seen.

But what is that has made it so great? Guess only a stoner can do justice to this question. People who were not present for the performance should not even try to answer this. The energy levels of the whole concert compared to the Hendrix performance was totally different. The melancholy mood of Star-Spangled Banner can somehow be made to describe the way people would have felt before the concert started. But the three days at Woodstock with bands like Grateful Dead, had changed the way everything actually was. The heavily distortion-ed and wah-wahed Star-Spangled performance was like a reality check. People actually felt the pain about what was happening to them. It brought them down to the real world and amplified all their sufferings. When Hendrix played the SSB there was not a single soul who was not listening. People just went quiet and heard what Jimi had to say.About 800,000 people were just quietly listening and had nothing to say!

It was just like a mass discourse, and people kept going deeper and deeper into the hole that Jimi was digging. Though, following it up with Purple Haze kind of let them off the hold, still I think it was the only song he could have played after that. But the damage was more than done and people left with an indelible impression for the rest of their life!

Psychedelic Breakfast

Have you ever woken up with the sound of a dozen people screaming all around you and blood all over you ?
Do you wake up to death and misery and you still somehow manage to breathe ?
Does helpless children keep dying all around you and all you can do is watch and cry ?
Dreams ... realities ... the truth ... religion ... they are all confusing.

Getting killed every night , be it in a local brawl, a shootout, disease , a crash on the highway are mundane dreams that I have got used to. The only dreams that can make you sweat in 12 degrees are much more than you can ever imagine in your pro-asthetic happy life. Happiness has become such a big commodity today, its getting sold everywhere and people get blinded and never understand what they are buying. The darkness is all around, we dont know it but its spreading and somehow it creeps into my dreams.

4:15 AM is the time for my daily doze of breakfast......not the usual one but the one in coldness and where I am always alone. Demons, ancient warriors, orks and all the ugly scum on the face of this Earth are after me. The promised land is never there ..... again and again I strive to be the next saviour but all in vain. I am always slayed and in this early morning snack, I always try to recollect what went wrong today. Despise for everything Black was a thing of the past. I sit by my old broken chair with a cup of Black coffee and the strongest of smoke. The people never have any truth about them, they are all new faces, every day. But some how they always fell that I have disappointed them and now they are all after me.

Till I die, they will keep following .......

The Gentle Breeze

Zeph·yr ( P )

1. The west wind. (a) A gentle breeze.
2. Any of various soft light fabrics, yarns, or garments.
3. Something that is airy, insubstantial, or passing.

Zephyr (Roman Favonius)

Also Zephyrus. In classical mythology the west wind, the son of Astraeus and Aurora and the brother of Boreas. He loved Hyacinth, but because the youth preferred Apollo, Zephyr caused the god's quoit or discus to strike Hyacinth, causing his death.
Zephyr was the father of Achilles' immortal horses Xanthus and Balius, which he fathered on the Harpy Podarge. His wife was said by some to be Iris, but he was also said to be the lover of Flora. He was identified with the Roman Favonius, and his name is used for any soft, gentle wind.

Here is an interesting allusion I found out about Zephyr which the common usage can hardly ever suggest ......

APOLLO AND HYAKINTHOS (HYACINTH)

Apollo, who loved numerous female nymphs and mortal women also loved and seduced certain beautiful youths, chiefest among whom was Hyakinthos. He was a young Spartan prince who had already been wooed by the poet Thamyris. He, however, proved no rival to Apollo.

But catastrophe awaited...Zephyr, The West Wind, had also fallen in love with Hyakinthos and he was wildly jealous of Apollo. Hyakinthos gave his love only to Apollo and so, enraged, Zephyr decided that if he could not have the youth, — then no one else would have him.

One day, while Apollo was teaching the prince how to hurl the discus, Zephyr caught it in mid-air and hurled it back, crushing Hyakinthos’s skull. Apollo mourned and made the hyacinth flower bloom from the fallen drops of blood in eternal memory of the beautiful youth. A renaissance print shows Apollo cradling the dying Hyakinthos in his arms.


Now the question is why am I after Zephyr ??

Ever head the Zephyr song by RHCP .....

Zepher Song
Red Hot Chilli Peppers

Can I get your hand to write on
Just a piece of lead to bite on
What am I to fly my kite on
Do you want to flash your light on
Take a look its on display - for you
Coming down no not today

Did you meet your fortune teller
Get it off with no propellor
Do it up it's always stellar
What a way to finally smell her
Pick it up it's not to strong - for you
Take a piece and pass it on

Fly away on my Zephyr
I feel it more then ever
And in this perfect weather
We'll find a place together
Fly on my wing

Riddlin on liberator
Find a way to be a skater
Rev it up to levitator
Super mainly aviator
Take a look its on display - for you
Coming down no not today

Fly away on my Zephyr
I feel it more then ever
And in this perfect weather
We'll find a place together
In the water where the scent of my emotion
All the world will pass me by
Fly away on my Zephyr
We'll find a place together

Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa - do you
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa - won't you
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

Fly away on my Zephyr
I feel it more then ever
And in this perfect weather
We'll find a place together

In the water where the scent of my emotion
All the world will pass me by
Fly away on my Zephyr
We're gonna live forever
Forever

There have been times in the past week when I had just kept looking for what song to suit my mood and all the good songs seem to elude me at that moment by being overplayed or not in the mood for. The Zephyr Song is all about peace and exactly what the name suggests ... just like a gentle breeze !!

First Post !!! Just Testing ......