Snippets of a week gone by

It rained in the morning. Not the kind of incessant rains that could rupture thepimples on your face but the slow rain that could settle down on your moustachelike dew drops .

Thenewly introduced - fully cushioned seats in the Volvo busses are damn good . Youkind of get stuck in those foamy bucket seats and don’t have to move your assesalso . It’s kind of perfect for couch potatoes like me.

Mytummy is growing bigger every day. I fear that one day it’ll burst. Not that Ihave to make an entire career and earn my bread and butter like Shakira with mybelly, some sort of exercise will do a world of good. Some guys take ineverything and still manage to look thin . It’s the kind of difference betweenLord Krishna and Lord Ganesh . Krishna has a hell lot of cookies and butter andother junk stuff and yet he gets to be a chick magnet . Lord Ganesh on the other hand has a terrible paunch and 2 wives to deal with . Dealing with 2 women can prove to be very tough andprobably that’s why Lord Ganesh resorted to boring stuff like books and academics .There was a joke that I read somewhere--- ‘Why is Devdas always frustrated?’ Ans : ‘Both Chanda and Paro ask him Dildo la re’. I’m now going to restrict myfreedom of speech and expression beforeI speak something more profane.

Forthe 1^st time , I went out with a group of drunkards and faggots (doesthat sound rude??) . Okay a small party in a friend’s place. They are reallynice people. Though I didn’t drink and smoke , I loved the smell when the puffcoming out of the cigarette mixes with the air-conditioning . The smell isreally kickass . I have a penchant for weird smells like this. I also like the smell of the air when crackers are burst . Few of these friends drank beer . Iwas expecting that they would get on a high , totally intoxicated and madness would slam dunk their niceness and they would speak like wannabe suicides andit would turn out to be very entertaining but nothing of that sort happened.

HyderabadiBiryani : This is the best thing to have happened to the world after dahi puri ,veg puff and honey cake . I sometimes wonder what the bakers were smoking when they coined the term ‘Vegg Puff’. The hyderabadi birani is spicy , fluffy and simply amazing . The problem withyour gobi Manchurian or other stuff is that when you go out with your friends ,the pieces aren’t evenly divided amongall the people eating it. I don’t like that extra piece which everyone is eyeing andyet no one takes it. And so it just becomes cold and then when someone finallydoes get it (or, and this is more likely, the waiter becomes the final arbiter)it is all cold and not that tasty. Sometimes I’m not all that diplomaticwith people I’m comfortable with and don’t hesitate to barge on the food likecrows on a dead rodent .

TheDarius Sunawala show is back on radio . It’s been 6 years since this man lasthosted a show and it was great listening to him once again . He’s one of thevery few guys out there with a decent sense of humor . Others just tend to bephony , speak in a fake anglicized tone and shoot tripe down your throat. Iwould listen to the show almost every day when I was in 11th . All the I.Tpeople stuck in the traffic jams would call him up requesting for songs. I hadthen hoped that one day I too would get stuck in the traffic and will listen tothis show . The show is great but the traffic drives you livid ,it beats theshit out of you.

Killing Devdas

Bomaby wears a cloak of suspense

Years of no change have driven

So called ‘creative minds’ nuts

Hair trimmed , shaved cheeks

Fierce eyes

That say ‘I can stab you in the stomach anytime’

Devdas descends in to unknown territory

Leaving behind teardrops

wriggling about with rampant restlessness

Leaving behind neon bulbs

that shone shamelessly, all day long

Leaving behind the laidback labyrinth of histrionics

And also the little prostitute

who has thrown away her shimmery clothes

who now speaks flawless French and Tamil

and wears clearance sale jeans

Devdas thinks

Humor will kill the emotions

It’ll downplay the sentimentality

Humor was for an audience

Who lived in a world of make believe

Not for the cult loving elite

He drinks Mumbai from the cup called Bombay

Walks along the zig zag routes

Past chimneys those throw lightning

Urban Madness

Nihilistic forecasts

Prose without plots

And at the end of it all

Devdas dies

Insanity survives

Cinema shivers in between

COMMUNISTS OR DEMOCRATS

Stalin’s Russia I know not
Moscow today, billionaire’s haven
the hammer and sickle
have been thrown aside
Burnt cigar butts, opium fields
Families torn apart
Getting mugged in broad daylight
The rickety bus, the noisy alley
Cardboard box like houses
Working day and night for a few hundred pesos
The woman next door
Moaning in pleasure for hers
Waiting in long queues at the ration store
Few eggs , some rice
A bar of soap , some knick knacks
Expect them to last even 10 days?
Come let’s go back to the land
I always longed to go

The powerful , the merciless
The stone hearted
The economy that came tumbling down
Detroit that’s become a deserted town
Locked houses , so many cars – no takers
A hierarchical pyramid they created
Standing on its periphery
To the world outside
Presented a rosy picture
But buried in it , their own people
Motels overflowing with people
Tents that have emerged on the road
From skyscrapers, pink slips thrown
Even after this they suspect me
Because my name is Rashid
My country may be an old theater
Still I see people dancing in the aisle
Theirs like a swanky multiplex
Where people walk in and out like robots

Let's sub it out

The 1^st two days of stepping in to the workplace were pretty boring. Some random guys just walked in and were talking about us evolving from ‘Hello World’ programmers to writing codes to launch rockets and stuff like that. The tech park looks damn depressing . The architect probably got bored after designing one building and he just cut copy pasted the same blue print for the rest of them . Tall 10 floored , tainted glass, peach colored structures stand in front of you all set to make your life gloomy with their dullness . Then let’s talk about food .The thali consists of various things just dumped together , tastes bland and the curd is limited , so that makes it worse.

Then suddenly ‘knock knock who’s there?’

‘Subway’

‘Subway who?’

‘Come in and I’m all set to surprise you’

I’ve spent most of my life ordering standard stuff like honey cake and veg puff in a bakery or Roti , paneer butter masala and fried rice in a restaurant ,.There’s beauty in monotony , take for instance Kalki Koechlin, who plays the role of a confused NRI girl with insane parents in both the movies she has acted (Dev D and Shaitaan) , leads this rather complicated life and ends up in disastrous situations , don’t we all love her for that?? Entering Subway makes you feel like you have entered unknown territory. I’ve avoided this place for so long because of the ads that say that place serves food with having less than 5 gms of fat. If your food has to be tasty , then it’s got to be fatty , oily and drippy.

Once you are here , you are spoilt with choices . You have little time to make this transition from a novice to a pro. The journey is pretty simple .You have to choose from a variety of breads , salads and sauces . All you’ve got to do is to ask your tongue as to what it feels like tasting at that point in time . There’s an online tutorial to help you out so that you don’t find yourself out of place over there. Believe me , this stuff is damn good . It’s filling , tasty ,feels heavenly and pretty healthy too. It’s the perfect kind of thing that you would want to have on a lazy , laid back evening . So , let’s sub it out!!

The Painter

He was a recluse on the run ,
a hippy on the highway
or just a painter who travelled incognito .
He was the McKinsey man in SEZ Gurgaon ,
watching the bar graphs reach out high
He would take notice of the numbers embedded in between ,
solve complex arithmetic .
Math gave life to these otherwise boring straight lines .
He was the Ranbaxy representative watching the pills fall from the closet ,
like he could have painkillers for lunch
Or the automobile spare part dealer in Faridabad
Painting out shades of grey and steel
Giving his work a raw and rustic feel
Sometimes the ruffian in Bengal,
Who had just woken up from the bloody street fights
Or just drowning himself in the cultural milieu
Watching the air take a snap of autumn on it
He would become breathless on Friday
Suffer from an invisible illness on Saturday
Run a marathon on Sunday
Run till a barbed wire fence separated civilization and madness
And then wait for the climax
And like every other story , his too would have a long climax
a long winding and an unending one
He would just sit there
Waiting for colors to fall from nowhere
And fill the void
Just like it would happen to those beautiful actresses
In those soft drink ads

Confessions of a so called engineer

It was nearly 4 years back when I had finished my 2^nd PUC and I didn’t know what to do next . I’ve remained pretty aimless in life .Science was never a topic of great intrigue for me . A maternal aunt told me that Telecommunication would be a great choice because of the mobile telephony revolution , internet and some other things like 3G , 4 G which makes the news for all the wrong reasons. Since I was getting it in a pretty decent college, I decided to take this up.

Until 2 years back , I always thought that the power lines that carry electricity also carry these telephone signals . I would always wonder as to why the telephone doesn’t go dead when there’s a power cut . I once asked my cousin and she ‘Go ask the BESCOM guys’ . She was as lame as me . For people who are reading this and have no idea about telecommunication , the branch is the same as electronics and communication

I’ll give you my understanding of electronics and it may/may not be right the second case being more likely. Electronics is a pretty hopeless subject to study . It all stars of with 3 things called resistors , capacitors and transistors . Your teachers deceive you be telling that these 3 things are enough to bring about a change in the word. In transistors , there’s a base , emitter and a collector and you can find out voltages between them. Different permutations and combinations of two or more transistors help you get more current / voltage and stuff like that . Resistors and capacitors are these extras in an item song. They are just there , spread out wild and far , just to make their presence felt .I’ve never found them doing any useful stuff. Take these 3 different things and arrange them in some particular order and you get creepy creatures like flip flops and op amps . Finally arrange all of them on a board and that gives you a circuit .This is basically explains the electronics part. The bad part is you never experience current or voltage physically and what I’ve explained is just the tip o the iceberg , there are a hell lot of lousy creatures like transformers , semiconductors , the lesser said about them the better. All these tiny parts make up the circuit and you can imagine how messy a circuit may look

Now comes the communication part. After you build 2 circuits , you name one as the sender and the other as the receiver . The sender sends out some data using a transmitter . Air particles just pick up the data . These air particles akin to each other keep passing the data and it’s finally caught at the receiver . In places where there’s no air , I suppose there won’t be any communication .We can’t have windmills everywhere so some intelligent people thought let’s use optic fibers and lay them under the ground. The communication part involves complex words like synthesizing , quantization , modulation and other stuff like that. The words itself are so complex, the process is even more. The problem with optic fibers is that the rodents living below the ground eat it up and then the data is lost. So after 3 years of studying this subject , you realize that there are a hell lot of problems involved in transmitting data .That is when you are asked to do a project

This project is a very phony process. Some students run to the research institutes in the city . This research is a pretty lousy process . Some guy proves a thing , other guy disproves it and the cycle continues .Finally there’s a one eyed man in the world of the blind who wins the Nobel prize. Believe me all this research never works practically . For example India’s premier organization ISRO , couldn’t track the missing helicopter of a chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh even after 5 days.

Apart from all this , before you get to understand and have a ‘feel’ for the subject the college gives you tests , assignments , quizzes . You feel like standing in front of a mirror and shouting ‘Can I go mad, just stark raving mad?’ You know , you can’t afford to do it because our parents are going to beat the shit out of you. You become like Ashish Nehra who made the famous statement ‘Body mein injury nahi , Injury mein body hai’ . There are a few good souls out there like ‘Ganesh Rao’ and ‘Giridhar’ . These guys write some amazing stuff and you can scrape through your exams. There are other foreign guys who are lead pretty frustrated lives and haven’t done any credible research .So they end up being authors. These guys must be sued for cruelty to mankind

So basically the point is, don’t join electronics or telecommunication if you don’t find it interesting or if you have an exceptionally low IQ. I fit in to both these categories . How do you find out if you have a low IQ . Try doing aerobics , if you can move your hand and feet together , you are perfectly alright.I move my hand , I forget about my feet or the vice versa .There’s some sort of coordination problem . If you cannot trace back the route by which you entered a particular road , that also means you are pretty dumb. If you feel that math with symbols like mu and epsilon is just complex calligraphy then engineering isn’t the right thing to do. Go out , become a chef , feed a few hungry souls , become a script writer and entertain the world , plant more trees or do some NGO work . Don’t do what others do , do what you feel like . The arguments may be that you won’t get a great job with a good salary and stuff but let’s debate it out another day.

Confused about the victory

Virat Kohli said ‘We dedicate the world cup to Sachin Tendulkar. He’s the god of Indian cricket. With a stature that he enjoys in the cricket crazy nation, humility is almost impossible. But that’s what makes this man so special, Impossible ain’t a word for him! He’s been playing for more than two decades now, and has been a true cavalier throughout. Controversies are a rare artifact in his unbelievably long career.’

Virender Sehwag added ‘We dedicate the world cup to Sachin Tendulkar. He’s the god of Indian cricket. With a stature that he enjoys in the cricket crazy nation, humility is almost impossible. But that’s what makes this man so special, Impossible ain’t a word for him! He’s been playing for more than two decades now, and has been a true cavalier throughout. Controversies are a rare artifact in his unbelievably long career.’

‘Well , as of now , we really don’t know if the real trophy has been handed over to us or the fake one .I suppose the real one is still with the customs. So , I wouldn’t want to comment about whom to dedicate the world cup to ‘ chipped in Gautham Gambhir , trying to break the monotony in the “ dedicate world cup to Sachin “ speeches

When a reporter asked M S Dhoni , why everybody was talking about Sachin Tendulkar and not about the millions of Indian fans throughout the world who’ve been relentlessly supporting the team , Dhoni said ‘The cricket fans are fickle minded . When you are winning they cheer you or else they jeer you . Now that the world cup is in our hands , they are creating a huge hullabaloo or else they only boo , boo and boo. Wow , I just made so many rhyming sentences on the spot’, signed off Dhoni with a mischievous smile on his face’

When Sachin Tendulkar was asked that the rest of the members wanted to win the cup for him , whom did he want to dedicate the cup to , Sachin cheekily replied ‘I dedicate this world cup to Gulzarilal Nanda’. Sources say that this was a killer move by Sachin Tendulkar to divert the attention of the youth of India off Poonam Pandey and motivate them to google out information about this rather low-key Prime minister . Sources say that the trick had worked as Youtube searches were flooded with requests of Gulzarilal Nanda’s speech at the International Labor Conference at Geneva , Switzerland in 1947.

Munaf Patel sitting quietly in a corner when asked if Poonam Pandey’s offer motivated India to play harder , he said ‘ Well , instead of she going nude , she should first come and undress me .I smell so bad . Someone , motivate me to go and have a bath please!!! ‘ pleaded the medium pacer. A reporter said ‘if you dont, maggots will start inhabiting your body. Seriously. They might have already.’ Munaf seemed undeterred . Another added ‘ I Heard this amazing story on the BBC about a bloke who got fed up with showering and decided to give it up. In a while moss grew on his feet, and he ended up rooted in a flower pot in his mother´s living room. Feeing inspired? ‘ . Munaf flaunting the 2^nd expression of boredom on his face said ‘Still doesn’t help’. Sources say that he has only 2 expressions the first being ‘boring’ and the second ‘extremely boring’