Cogito, ergo doleo...

non-local fauna

2008-07-18T03:33:00.000-07:00

I was trying to sort out dinner in the kitchen the other evening, when I heard Shrik exclaim loud in the living room. I sauntered over.

"...the point of this ad. How many Indians would know what a skunk is, anyway?", he was telling Madhu.

I glanced at the screen, at an animated ad for a room freshener, and at the fluffy animal plugging it.

"Yep, that's a raccoon there, so you've proved yourself right," I said.

A rare, delicious moment of speechlessness followed.

"There is a skunk at the end of the ad, though," I added gently.

"The skunk at the end! That's what I was talking about!"

But I knew. And now you do, too.

Foosball and misunderstandings

2007-11-14T01:39:00.001-08:00

I had, earlier in the year, dragged Madhu to watch Resident Evil: Extinction, which I thought could not be worse than the previous two installments. I was wrong, and soon enough I found myself in the position of owing Madhu two movies of her choice. Which is rather scary when you know there is a Shah Rukh "I'm a Backstreet Boy" Khan movie lurking around the corner. Or the back street, so to speak.

So eventually, we found ourselves in the coffee shop at the movie hall, trying to fortify ourselves for the ordeal with lots and lots of caffeine. It is, in many circles, considered rude to speak with your mouth full, and therefore conversation flagged, and we gave our undivided attention to our coffees, except for Madhu, who was on the phone as usual, and Shrik "I don't have coffee at night: it ruins my sleep", who gazed into the distance, contemplating life, or perhaps his bed back at his place.

"Too much cricket in the media these days."

I looked up from my coffee to see Yoda folding her newspaper in disgust.

"It's the only sport India seems to support," she added.

"Yes, you don't see too much support for the Indian Foosball team," I remarked, with one of my subtle witticisms.

Yoda gave me a look.

"You don't see much support for the Indian any team!"

Shrik gave her a patient look, much like a father watching his toddler throw food.

"You don't see much support for any foosball team, Yoda, " he explained. Shrik is one of the few who gets my subtle witticisms, and vice versa. I have in the past explained to the others that great scientists and humourists like Wodehouse and Galileo, or the other way round, have been persecuted throughout their lives, but to little effect.

"Except maybe the Americans," Yoda stated, in a rare flash of insight.

"True," said Shrik, who had spent more time in the US than the rest of us, who hadn't spent any. "They probably have a few teams that compete with each other for a 'World Foosball Cup'."

We lapsed into silence, like a few trappist monks, except for Madhu, who was very un-trappist-monk-ishly talking nineteen to the dozen into her mobile.

At which point I remembered something of importance that I needed to tell Shrik.

"Hey, apparently Khushru heard your remark that we should be renting his place out for new year's eve, and said that we could just come over, no problems."

Shrik raised a puzzled eyebrow.

"I didn't say anything."

Yoda realized some clarifying was in order.

"I told him that Matto was the one who said it. And I told him that he should be renting his place out and earning a bit on the side!"

"So he confused the story and randomly added my name into it. Hm. Maybe he was tired", Shrik said, taking the philosophical view.

"He was not tired when I told him all this!"

"But maybe he was tired when he told me this last evening. You know, memory refuses to jog and all that..", I interjected.

"You mean, he told you that I told you all this yesterday? It was ages ago!"

"No, no, he told me all this yesterday." I explained. It's surprising how far one can stretch a little misunderstanding.

Yoda fell into a reverie, and we resumed the trappist monk routine.

Then she brightened.

"You know what, he must have confused the story and randomly added Shrik's name into it!"

Shrik and I exchanged glances, shaking our heads a little. Which is tough to do, actually. Requires some skilful neck-eye coordination.

"Maybe he was tired," I said, with another of my subtle witticisms. I have a lot of them, but like I said, hardly anyone notices.

"I'm tired," said Shrik, and left for home. The rest of us spent the next three hours flinching in the movie hall while Om Shanti Om tried desperately to entertain with self-parody. Which goes to show you... goes to show you something, I forget what, but you see it, don't you?

Paging buildings

2007-09-10T13:15:00.000-07:00

I finally have broadband installed in my house, which means I can now be rude to my sis across the room (be rude across the room, not my sis across the room - I have only one sis, even if she's across the room) on google talk, and type witty repartees faster than she can speak to me (across the room).

So this evening, My sis, Madhu, and yours truly (that's three of us - Me, my sis, and Madhu, though my sis is also Madhu, but the aforementioned Madhu is not my sis Madhu) were sitting at our respective laptops and while I was immersed in the archives of Wookieepedia, which, incidentally, all you people should check out, the two Madhus were doing random stuff like checking mail. Suddenly Madhu (not my sis) broke the silence.

"Wow, look at this hi-fi building paging!"

I knew about some really nifty buildings from Japan, but they never paged each other, as far as I knew, so I sat up and took notice. But my sister was quicker, though her hearing wasn't as good.

"My building?"

Madhu raised her eyebrows. This information needed a keen line of questioning, she decided.

"Eh?"

"Oh, did you say 'a building', or 'my building'?"

"My building?"

"Your building?"

"What?"

"What?"

I decided enough was enough. These silly girls were not even close to the nub of the issue. I intervened.

"How can buildings page each other?"

Both girls looked at me.

"She said Beijing. A cool building in Beijing."

"I said Beijing. A cool building in Beijing."

This was rich, I thought. Two girls giving me the frosty look, all because one of them can't pronounce Beijing properly, not to mention their own partial deafness. And "my" doesn't even rhyme with "your". And they completely missed the point about the paging. One must take a firm line with these things.

"Oh, ah," I retorted, pointedly.

And went back to Wookieepedia. Which, incidentally, you should check out.

Desmodromic valves

2007-08-11T03:52:00.000-07:00

I don't know why I call this post 'Desmodromic Valves'. For one, I am not going to write about desmodromic valves. Okay, maybe a little, because today was the day I found out what these valves are all about. To be brief (since I've already promised that I wouldn't be writing about them), they are valves with positive return mechanisms that make sure that the valve in an internal combustion engine returns to its original place, instead of the sissy mechanisms that rely on things like springs to do the job for them. Today was also the day I realized another major thing about myself - I heartily approve of the desmodromic valve principle, which makes sure stuff happens, instead of leaving it to spring resilience or gravity or the government or mom.

Talking about mom, she incidentally was visiting recently and tried once again to educate me on the art of cooking, but would not let me reason why. This time, she was educating me on the right daal-chawal technique.

"So you add lots of water to the lentils, add turmeric, and chuck it in the pressure cooker. DO NOT add salt. Add salt only after it's all cooked."

Now we engineers know there are reasons for each process, and phrases like "company policy" and "the ten commandments" do not faze us. We have, in the course of our education and career, learnt to perfect the process of probing into the depths of established processes and laying bare the underlying reasons by asking direct, well-chosen questions that put the finger on the nub, so to speak. Which is what I proceeded to do.

"Why?"

"Because if you do, you'll never get those lentils cooked."

I raised an eyebrow.

"Hang on. The whole pressure cooker idea is to elevate the boiling point of water, right? Now adding salt to water does the same thing. So combining the two should actually cook the lentils better, right? Right? Ha!"

Mom turned to my sis, who for some reason was standing around with a grin on her face.

"This is why you should do the cooking."

This is why Galileo decided to stay out of the kitchen and proceeded to invent the telescope, and Gustav Mees vented his feelings by developing the Desmodromic valve. I can't invent stuff myself, but I can drink beer. And I think I will.

CPR

2007-02-23T10:21:00.000-08:00

The last time I left my blog alone for this long, I got to the point where I found all my entries embarrassing, and after the one year it took me to figure out what my password was, I deleted the damn thing.

This time, I decided not to. No, not because I'm more shameless than I was four years ago - I more shameless than I used to be four years ago, but that's not it. It's not that I don't find the posts embarrassing. Nope, I do. Sometimes. But not as embarrassed as I should be had I been the director of "Ghost Rider", watching which Shrik and I laughed our heads off a few hours ago. And I haven't suddenly thought of anything earth-shattering to post, either. In fact, this post won't even rattle my own laptop screen, which finds itself mounted on a slightly loose hinge, and will have a natural frequency of about a tenth of the other laptops my colleagues have. I have not marinated in the bath, thinking about gold crowns, and therefore am not in a position to say "Eureka" like Shakespeare, or Archimedes, depending on whether you're a Bertie Wooster or a Reginald Jeeves fan.

The thing is, I have nothing better to do right now.

There. I've said it, and I hope it makes you feel better about yourself. Anyways, to fill in the gap since November, I still continue to have no life, my bike continues to be my significant other, my camera continues to be my mistress (I don't care what Freud thinks of my zoom lens), I continue to have accidents, meet weird people, have strange conversations with my weirder friends- often lubricated by alcohol - and when I find time from all this, try to pretend I'm working so I get paid at the end of the month so I can fill up my bike's tank and load film in my camera. In fact, nothing has changed, except that I'd become too lazy to write. I'd become too lazy to wash my clothes, too, but you don't have to wear your smelly blog to work.

Anyways, since I'm trying to revive this blog, I shall try to write about something. Now what shall I think of... hang on, I shall just ask Shrik.

Bad idea.

This is what just happened:

I leaned over to Shrik and jogged his brain a bit.

"What's the weirdest thing you can think of? Quick! One word!"

Blank look.

"One word?"

"All right, a phrase, then. Quick!"

Shrik looks at the wall for a while, and brightens.

"Martians hate pink."

See? Bad idea. But in the words of the immortal Adolf Hitler, "es muss gemacht werden", which, in a less ominous-sounding language, translates to "it has to be done".

Why would martians hate pink? According to Dr. John Gray, Ph.D, we would. From when we were babies, we were clothed in blue, and our sisters in pink. Unless you were brought up by a mom like mine, who, though she assures me that she did want a boy and all, still used to amuse herself by dressing me up in frocks and doing my hair into what she claimed was a ponytail, but what, from photographic evidence, looked suspiciously like a bonsai coconut tree. I was three. Ha ha, mom, you almost had me going there for a while. Twenty-five years, to be exact.

But we digress. Why do men, even the funny green ones from our neighbouring planet, hate pink? I'll tell you a secret - we don't. We love pink. We just don't like it on ourselves. There was this girl in college who used to wear these plain, pastel-coloured salwar-kameez in the lightest shades of pretty much all the colours, and she looked breathtakingly like a cool afternoon breeze. Now a cool afternoon breeze is not much if you're in Haridwar in December, but this was Trichy. In the summer. Not that cool afternoon breezes can be seen, but if they could, they would probably look like this girl. And pink looked lovely on her. My favourite was lime-green, though. See, there's another colour. I, for one, would not want to be seen dead in a lime-green salwar-kameez, but I don't hate it. The same as pink.

So there, Shrikman.

On stuff I keep forgetting to write down...

2006-11-12T10:43:00.001-08:00

...like the startling revelation I had about transcendental numbers the other day. I don't remember what it exactly was, but at least I now know that it's not about root canals. Which reminds me, I need to get that premolar looked at.

But, first things first.

Really sorry - again. This does seem like a rather dry year for me, overall. Can't think of anything to write most of the time. Sometimes I do think of things to write, but then I forget what they were. Rather difficult to remember details and fight a hangover at the same time. On top of it all, I am as geographically unsettled as that metal shot from the ball-bearing you put into the do-it-yourself jumping bean (which never jumps, I wonder why they called it that. They should've called it 'tumblebean' or something). Anyways, like the shot, I go to Pune, and by the time I finish unpacking, it's time to go to Haridwar again, and vice versa, or the other way round.

Anyways, I have grown slightly older since the last post, see? So perhaps, instead of telling you about the strange things that happened to me (which would fill a small book, if only I can remember all of them), I shall share the wisdom I have gained over the past few months. Oh, well, what the heck - I'll make it 'over the course of my life'. Not much of a difference, anyway. This is why you should keep writing these things down.

So. There you go, a few nuggets. Don't spend it all in one place.

1. That transcendental number thingie. Though I don't remember the exact detail that made me go 'hey, I didn't know this!'

2. Buy black-and-white film whenever you find it, and expiry dates be damned.

3. If you are getting introduced to a cute-ish girl by a friend, and you have this official name, and this friend introduces you by your nickname, and the girl gets confused and asks you what she should call you, NEVER, repeat, NEVER say "you can call me anything you like". Nope. NOT smooth. Unless you're Brad Pitt, in which case you can even say "Me Tarzan" and get away with it.

4. Never crack jokes to mum about doing anything remotely insane with your career.

5. If your bike does not like you wearing khakis, and gives you a hint by dumping you on the gravel unceremoniously, listen to it. Do not buy another pair of khakis to replace the ones you just tore. Guess what will happen if you do.

6. Never spray-polish your motorcycle seat. It looks all nice and shiny, but hit the brakes, and you'll immediately know why it was a mistake. Especially if you're a guy.

7. When, in Haridwar, you find yourself griping to your friendly-neighbourhood ENT surgeon about the unavailability of alcohol in the city, and the doctor, in a gesture that, on judgement day when trumpets sound, will firmly ensure his passing through the pearly gates, offers to get you a bottle of whisky using his ex-serviceman clout, forget about being decent and take him up on the offer. Especially if you're stuck in a hotel room for a real long time.

8. The probability that you will run into an important client is directly proportional to the combined length of all the tears on your worn-out pair of jeans.

9. The whole 'round number' thing is overrated. Unless I can come up with two more nuggets. Meanwhile, remember what I said, especially about the black-and-white film.

While I'm still thinking of what to write...

2006-09-23T13:49:00.000-07:00

... I decided to throw in a few more snaps of Ladakh.

The first one is a shot taken in the More plains , a 40 km stretch of, er, plains, right in the middle of the mountains. Once again, I had a sensory overload of sorts, having never seen so much space in one sitting. As soon my hands could hold a camera without shaking the lens free from its mount, I snapped off a shot.

The second one is a slightly weird sort of place, Tanglangla pass, which proclaims itself to be the second highest motorable pass in the world. It was rather cold, but the sun blazed down, bounced off the snow, hurt our eyes, and caused the distracting bokeh on the photograph. And yes, the teensy spot on the lower left corner is Kakkar's bullet.

This pass was deserted except for this old man who was manning a tea shop. I decided to go and make some conversation.

"So... you stay up here all alone?"

"Why? What would you do if I said yes? Why do you want to know? Who are you people? Give me your vehicle numbers! What do you mean by that question?"

This was not the sort of response I expected, but we travelling engineers are quick on our feet. I laughed a light, dismissive laugh, and attempted to make amends.

"Heh, I think you misunderstood me..."

"I understand everything! You think I'm all alone out here? What can you possibly do to me? Give me your vehicle numbers! Wait, I'll note them down myself!"

Tea at Tanglangla pass thus had to wait till our return trip, when we found the shop manned by a ladakhi lady and her daughter, who were much more friendly and generous with their tea.

Somehow I couldn't bring myself to ask them if they were there all day all by themselves.

To err is French; to aar, English

2006-09-17T12:56:00.000-07:00

One of the advantages of traveling a lot is that you get a lot of plane/train/automobile time to catch up on your reading. And in the past few weeks, I had managed to do just that, reading some sci-fi and some non-sci-fi books, and consciously avoiding Wodehouse, the way a chap who has drunk too much every day of the week consciously avoids the pubs on Sunday. There is one thing such as too much of a good thing.

But the chap, avoiding the bottle for a good three hours into the evening comes upon a store that shouts out loud: "Happy hour!", or possibly, "Cobra beer available here!" finds his resolution breaking down, and thus last evening I walked out of the Airport bookshop in Bangalore clutching "The Luck of the Bodkins".

The flight was nice, once people who looked up in alarm at my chuckling by myself every five minutes or so decided that I was a harmless geek trapped in the body of a harmless geek, and diverted their attentions elsewhere, like the extremely cute flight attendants. I would have given them more attention, and possibly even talked to them, but then I came upon a passage that put an end to the chuckling. This is that passage, read very carefully:

(But first - a bit of background: Monty Bodkin, who is, at the time, in France, is writing a letter to his fiancee, and wants to enquire about her father, who is suffering from sciatica. At which point, he realizes that he does not know how to spell 'sciatica'. Read on.)

...he had first consulted his friend the waiter, and the waiter had proved a broken reed. Beginning by affecting not to believe that there was such a word, he had suddenly uttered a cry, struck his forehead and exclaimed:

"Ah! La sciatique!"

He had then gone on to make the following perfectly asinine speech:

"Comme ça, m'sieur. Like zis, boy. Wit' a ess, wit' a say, wit' a ee, wit' a arr, wit' a tay, wit' a ee, wit' a ku, wit' a uh, wit' a ay. V'la! Sciatique!"

Upon which Monty, who was in no mood for this sort of thing, had very properly motioned him away with a gesture and gone off to get a second opinion.

Not funny. Not funny at all. Those of you who did find it funny evidently have not tried spelling bees with a Frenchman. I was forced to learn the language at a weak period in my life - it was shortly after I had shaved off my moustache, and as any man who has shaved off his moustache would tell you, it leaves your upper lip exposed and for a long time, till you get used to the air on your upper lip (as opposed to the 'air that was on it, ha, ha) you have this feeling that suddenly everyone is looking at your upper lip and secretly laughing at it. "Look at that chap's upper lip! Hahahahaha!", their smiles seem to say. If you're not able to find an ex-mustached chap to confirm this, think Samson's hair. Karna's armour. Scorcese's eyebrows. See?

Anyways, as I was learning french, I realized that they were a little confused about a few things, namely the alphabet. They pronounce "i" as "e", "e" as "a", and "q" as "k". But they write "i" as "i", "e" as "e", and "q" as "q". There are a few more pronunciations I remember being puzzled about, but the memory is hazy - this was about three years ago. In any case, I did remember a smattering of french, and on my trip to Ladakh, I thought I saw a golden opportunity to use it.

Kakkar, Gina, and I were on our way back to Leh from Nubra valley (where we saw bactrian camels, but more on that later), and we had stopped for a bit of lunch at this small village called Khalsar. We were sitting back after a satisfying meal, when I heard a voice off-stage.

"Exxcuze me, way-ar I find a Enfield mecanique?"

I turned around, and saw a young european chap in full riding leathers. His name, he told us later, was François, and he was on his way back to Leh, and that his riding companion, an Englishman, had had an accident, and the army had eventually airlifted him to a hospital in Leh. So now our man was riding back to Leh alone, and it looked like his Enfield Electra was out of lube oil. We apprised him of the situation, which was that no, there was no mechanic nearby, and that the nearest place he would get oil would involve a forty km ride. His bike was in no condition for the trip. Kakkar's clutch cable was doing a good job of acting out the "to be or not to be" sequence in Hamlet, while Kakkar wanted it to firmly stay in the "to be" zone. Thus, I found myself taking a longish ride in search of oil, with François riding pillion. We made good time, stopping only once to pick up the chain guard of my bike, which had fallen off laughing when François made a remark about my bike being smooth.

Two hours later, we topped up his oil and invited him to ride with us. Safety in numbers and all that sort of thing. And all was going well, when, on the climb to Khardungla pass, I saw François, Gina, and Kakkar stop and gesticulate wildly. Fearing an avalanche, I looked over my shoulder in the general direction they were pointing, and saw a furry brown animal the size of a mutant rabbit run off into the rocks.

"It's a Himalayan Ferret!"

My knowledge with respect to Himalayan fauna was limited, so I accepted this. Ferret. Now if only I could have seen what it looked like.

"'Ow you spell Fehrret?" François wanted to know.

If you had ever studied physics in school, you'd know that some teachers always have pet questions that they would love to have you ask them. So they start by telling you about luminiferous ether, and how it was omnipresent, like God, and very dense, perhaps like God again, but I wouldn't want to speculate on it, and leading us on, till one of us put up our tiny little hands and asked, "But why don't we feel it if it is dense?", and a slow smile would spread across his face, and a twinkle would appear in his eye. He then would say, "A-ha! That is exactly what Michelson and Morley wondered!" and then go on to explain the experiment. Right up to that moment, if you had asked me if I knew why these teachers were so happy to be asked such non-challenging questions by kids, I'd have looked you in the eye and shaken my head. Very difficult to do, looking someone in the eye while shaking the head, but I'd have done it. But not anymore. François' question had the effect of pouring oil on my rusty french, and I rose to the occasion. Ah, the poor man, how he must have suffered trying to convert english phonetic spellings into French. Fortunately for him, I was just what the doctor ordered. A slow smile spread across my face, and a twinkle appeared in my eye.

"Ef-ay-err-err-ay-tay. Ferret."

François seemed to consider this.

"F-a-l-l-a-tay. Fallat?"

I heard a few ugly snickers, which threatened to, and eventually did, burst into gales of laughter. The only people who did not find the goings-on funny were François and yours truly. And that was probably all that François had going for him at the moment. What did he mean, I remember thinking, by claiming to be French when he could spell perfectly well in English? What about the famous French pride? Gah! And thoughts to this effect. Still, I had made an effort, and if I had to tattoo the spelling of 'Ferret' into his skull, I would. I continued doggedly:

"Non, non - I was spelling it in French for you..."

More laughter from the direction of the snow. François merely looked puzzled.

"F-e...hahahahahahah...r-r-...oh, God...-e-t. Ferret", Gina finally gasped.

"Aah, Fehrret!" A broad smile lit up François' face. "I weel remember!"

And what with all the howling and guffawing, the Ferret never did resurface, and I had to later satisfy my curiosity with a photograph displayed on one of the curio shops.

To top it all, the damn thing was a Himalayan Marmot, not a Ferret. Not that I'd ever know the difference, but perhaps a Marmot would have gone down better in spelling.

Don't get up, I'm just tagging along...

2006-08-18T13:17:00.000-07:00

One cannot resume blogging after a long break without finding out that someone has tagged him. Just the way you can't leave your bike out in the parking lot for about a month and go off to Haridwar, and expect to find the battery still nestling in its place when you return. It's a law of nature.

So, before I go further, and before more accusations of "you still owe me a tag!" are hurled at me, I present to you my latest tag. Not unlike one of those "complete the following sentences with phrases of your own" series of exercises we did back in our language classes. Yes, the ones we looked forward to as much as we look forward to a date with the dentist with root canal work on the menu.

Like the dentist says, let's make this a quick and painless job.

Here are my responses.

I am thinking about – tags and how they spread from blogger to blogger like a virus.
I said – I'm thinking about tags and how they spread from blogger to blogger like a virus.
I want to – know who thinks of these tags, really. And I also want to meet him/her. If it's a him, I'd like to meet him over some duelling pistols, and if it's a her... how about a coffee? I know this really nice place...
I wish – it would turn out to be a her.
I miss - very frequently, so just in case it's a him, I'll need a bit of practice.
I hear – duelling pistols don't come very cheap, these days.
I wonder – how much of my hard-earned money will go into them pistols. Coffee would be much cheaper, wouldn't it? Please let it be a her.
I regret – not putting in enough practice - both in duelling and in asking girls out for coffee.
I am – bloody lazy that way.
I dance – pretty bad, which I think is also linked to my 'bad-at-asking-girls-out-for-coffee' trait...
I sing – pretty bad, too. Strike three.
I cry – in your dreams, pal. Hah. Me macho, see? Even if me underweight. (Hang on while I scratch myself and spit out the side of my mouth).
I am not always - macho... I'm not so used to duelling pistols, see?
I make with my hands - pretty good coffee, though. Filter coffee. The problem is the availability of a decent filter.
I write – when I'm not working, riding my bike, taking photographs, watching movies, duelling, or summoning up courage to ask girls out for a coffee.
I confuse – love and war, sometimes... who was I supposed to be duelling?
I need – some coffee. All this talk of coffee this late in the night, what did you expect?
I should try – and see if the kitchen in this hotel is still open.
I finish – with a benevolent smile directed at fellow bloggers, and say the four magic words - "the tag stops here".

There, me man. I hope you're satisfied. It wasn't quick, it wasn't painless, but that's how nice a guy I am.

Who cares how the crow flies?

2006-08-13T12:26:00.000-07:00

Okkkkay, so that's not an original line - It was part of a print ad for the Yamaha R1 that I once came across (the print ad, not the Yamaha R1, though I wouldn't mind coming across that, either), and the accompanying photograph showed a nice, winding mountain road with hairpin bends and stuff that bikers dream of. And that's how you feel when you go beyond the Rohtang pass, and into the barren, sparsely-populated, winding road that loops and stretches for over 400 kms over mountains and plains, leading to Leh.

Aaanyways, all you people who've been under the impression that I've been bumming it out in Leh all this while, nopes, so you can stop turning green. We left sometime around mid-june, and returned early in the first week of July. Since then it's just been backlog, backlog, and backlog, which, when combined with general laziness, results in no new posts on the blog. So, those of you who do visit this blog after all this time, really sorry, folks, and thanks for returning.

Now, I'm not much for writing travelogues, but I do have a few stories to tell, and hopefully I will get off my lazy behind and put up some of them here. In the meantime, I thought I'd dust off the cobwebs from this page, and give you people a taste of the place.

But first, a shot of my trusty steed, which has been my sole companion for the past five years, including this bone-jarring ride:

Yep, that is masking tape on the tank. Apart from that, and apart from the chain guard falling off, and the engine stalling right in the middle of an ice-cold puddle on the return trip, it was fine. Really.

Now, some of the general scenery there, which was, to put it mildly, breathtaking. For two reasons:
(a) There was too much to handle - deep blue skies, stark, rugged mountains, a river/gorge/desert suddenly springing up around the bend... a man can only take so much, y'know.
(b) We hit altitudes of upto 18,000 feet, and the oxygen content gets a little low.

I took this snap at Tikse Gompha. Gompha, I believe, stands for Monastery. The first time I went there, I almost had a whaddyoucallit sort of encounter. Bachha and I were climbing the stairs, cursing the thin air under whatever breath we had left, when an old lama, coming from the other direction looked at me and exclaimed, "You! I see you before!"

I was amazed. I'm not very good with faces, but I believe I would remember my first encounter with a lama. This guy is going to tell me I was a fellow-lama in my previous life, I thought. No wonder I've always wanted to stay in a monastery. That explains my shaolin temple fixation, too! Now it all makes sense. And the-

"I see you at Yak-Tail hotel this afternoon!"

And my semi-spiritual experience came to a grinding halt.

The monk in the snap is not the old monk (oh, ha, ha, you alcoholics), but another monk, another day, when I went back to Tikse.

Right-ho. Now that I've broken the block, I shall be back more frequently, with more photos. I go sleep now, yes please.

I'm off, folks!

2006-06-15T23:03:00.000-07:00

Once again, many apologies, boys and girls, I had to finish off a lot of work and drink up all the beer in my fridge - I'm travelling again, and this time, strictly for pleasure. Going to Ladakh, on two wheels and lots of prayers... if I survive, we shall meet. At Philippi or elsewhere.

Till then, be good.

Cooling my heels...

2006-06-06T08:29:00.000-07:00

The other day, thanks to the pre-monsoon showers, Shrik and I felt that primal urge that neanderthals probably felt whenever there were pre-monsoon showers, to go to Mulshi and sit around, doing nothing. So, we went. I lugged my camera along, too, and took off a few snaps of the, um, brown water and the brown earth, and the slightly-brown-tinged blue skies. I guess it would take a while before the area becomes green and irritates Anurag, who prefers different shades of different colours in the scenery. After taking a few snaps last monsoon of green trees not standing out against the green grass and the green moss, I agree with him. Not that I have anything against greenpeace or any of the environmental activists, but too much of green, though easy on the eye, is tough to photograph well. Anyways, there you are.

Camera: Canon EOS 66
Film: Kodak Max 400
Lens: Canon 28-80mm

And what was Shrik doing when I was taking pictures? Believe it or not - this.

Shimmer

2006-05-31T04:33:00.000-07:00

I'd taken this pic sometime in January, when I was visiting Kerala. Kottayam, to be exact. Like all small towns I visit, I was amazed at the blue skies, clean air, and the absence of a Barista around the corner. Nice place, except that if you want to go into a temple, you need to strip to the waist. Never figured that one out... anyways, I was walking around at noon over there, trying to find some subjects to shoot, and this one came out quite well. I was showing this to Anurag yesterday, and he suggested I invert it, and he was right, it does look more interesting this way.

For the people who have already seen the right-side-up pic in my flickr album, sorry, I shall hopefully be posting something soon, but the days, they are a-crazy. For example, I crashed KP's brand-new bike... with KP on it, but more on that later. Yes, he's fine. No, the bike is not, so don't rub it in. And I'm fine, too, thanks for asking.

However, they should do something about that "healing" spray that the nurses liberally hosed me with. After they'd pulled me back down from the ceiling and cleared away the bits of plaster that I'd knocked loose, I realized that I now had a neat waterproof coating on all my bruises. All very nice, but not a vey pleasant process. You guys, next time you have a fall, try this spray out. And watch out for that ceiling.

Sitting and staring...

2006-04-22T11:50:00.000-07:00

...was what I did. A lot. In the last few weeks, on the windowsill of this amazingly high building I was staying in at Kandivili. Yep, I know, I know, I have already mentioned this to all and sundry, but I can't get over it. And I recently found out that it was not the 27th floor, but the 29th floor, since p1 and p2 were for parking! And the view at night is amazing, and I had my camera handy, and voila tout:

Please click here for a larger version. Please? Pretty please?

And is that a shooting star on the top right, or a scratch on the negative? I guess it's going to be an unsolved mystery... that, and the Bermuda triangle.

Details:
Camera: Canon EOS 66
Lens: Canon 28-80 mm
Film: Fuji Pro 100
Focal length: 28 mm
Aperture: f/16
Exposure: 30 sec

I'm back! Big as life and twice as tagged.

2006-04-08T01:09:00.000-07:00

Hell-O, PEOPLE! How have we all been?

I'm awfully sorry for the rather long absence from the scene, but travel and work had taken their toll, and I did not want to put up too many photographs - I was already doing that too often. Anyways, here we are again, and thank you all for visiting that long-dead post and asking for more. Unfortunately, though I have a few strange incidents to narrate, I have a backlog of tags to take care of. I know, I know, a poor way to make up for a long absence, but I have been tagged by these ladies, and I would not be the preux chevalier if I were to not comply. Very sorry, and I promise more stuff in the very near future.

Okkkay, then, here we go:

Tag #1: Shruti has demanded that I reveal my music taste to all and sundry, so here I am. Shrutz, I'm not really much of a music person, more of a movie person. In fact, I'll start a movies tag and circulate it around, and you definitely will be it. Ha. Anyways, the music stuff:

Total volume of music on my computer: 4.3 GB. And a lot of it has been dumped in by Shrik and Kakkar. Like I said, I'm not too much into music.

Title & Artist that I last bought: "Rang De Basanti". Three days ago. I know, I know, what was I doing all these months, eh? These things happen. You may shake your head, mutter "old man, old man", and let it go at that.

Song I am playing right now: "Maybe Tomorrow" by Stereophonics, which, incidentally, is also the song that plays during the closing credits of "Crash". Lovely song.

Five+ Songs that I like/have been hooked onto:

American Pie (Don MacLean - American Pie): I continue to be floored by the clarity of Don MacLean's voice. Every time I listen to this song, I'm transported to Goa, where, in the winter of 2001, we rode rented bikes all over the city sometime past midnight, mildly under the influence, singing - yelling, actually - the song out to the sleepy public. No, we did not get arrested. Goa, remember?

Time (Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon): I was introduced to Floyd sometime in the first year of college, and have been hooked ever since. I know, the music is a little outlandish, about as spaced-out as the artists... but I love it. "Time" starts with a gazillion clocks hitting their alarm bells all at once, and I've used the effect to advantage on many a sleepy visitor at my hostel room. But seriously, this is one of the most amazing songs ever. There is a sence of urgency, despair and resignation in it that makes you sit up and pay attention, especially all of us procrastinators.

November Rain (Guns and Roses - Use your Illusion I) : I know, I know. Groans all around, I'll bet. I used to love November rain back when I was a student, and unfortunately it's not managed to survive the test of time. BUT. The guitar solo by Slash. Is. Awesome. Mr.Satan, if you're reading this, I would really like to sell my soul so I can play the guitar like him. Please?

Learning to fly (Pink Floyd - Momentary Lapse of Reason): Yep, another Floyd track. Into the distance, a ribbon of black stretched to the point of no turning back. A flight of fancy on a windswept field; standing alone, my senses reeled. Yep, mine, too. Very strong imagery, and with all the Floyd darkness thrown in.

Take it to the limit (The Eagles): I was introduced to the Eagles when I flicked their 'Best of, 1971-75' collection from my dad. That was about ten years ago, and I still haven't returned the cassette... sorry, appa. But more about my childhood antisocial behaviour later. I've loved almost all their songs, with Take it to the Limit, Take it easy, Desperado, Tequila Sunrise, Hotel C, and Life in the fast lane topping my list.

Susie Q (Creedence Clearwater Revival): Catchy. No other way to describe it. If you listen closely, they really don't have much to say in this particular song, but catchy. Very catchy.

Elevation (U2 - All that you can't leave behind): Another of those catchy numbers. And you do feel what the song promises. Elevation, without miosis or other side-effects.

The sound of silence (Simon and Garfunkel, Sounds of Silence): They had me at "hello darkness, my old friend". Hello back to you guys with knobs on.

Extreme Ways (Moby) : I came across this song when I was watching "The Bourne Identity". I'd loved the music throughout the movie - the staccato beats, and the edgy, disoriented feel throughout the movie was achieved very well. And then this song in the end credits. It was the perfect song for the movie.

Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries": By now an overused and often-spoofed track, I guess. But I'll never forget the overwhelming feeling of watching the helicopters flying in from the sea, with this song blaring on their speakers, scaring the hell out of the villagers in "Apocalypse Now". The madness of it all hits you like a sledgehammer. Not that I've been hit with a sledgehammer, but one can imagine. On an aside, I have almost been hit by a sledgehammer, when the head of one got detached from the handle held by an over-enthusiastic labmate and described a graceful trajectory across the smithy, missing my face by inches. I was in my first year of college, and it put me off shop class for a while. That, and carpentry.

The End (The Doors, Best of): Again, one of my favourite groups. Jim Morrison. What-a-voice. Gives me goosebumps. Once again, movie association: This is the song that "Apocalypse Now" begins with, and it sets the mood perfectly for the movie. All the children are insane.

Tag #2: This one was from Vaish. Now I am to arrange for a party of sorts, exclusively for bloggers, and have to invite six bloggers to it. Now, before I could balk at the idea of anyone actually visiting my apartment and recoiling in horror at the cockroaches and the piles of clothes in the kitchen, the books in the loo, and the motorcycle components in the bedroom, I was assured that this is to be an imaginary party. Thank god. However, right now I am staying at this guest house in Bombay, which, situated on the 27th floor of a Kandivili high-rise, offers an amazing view, and you people are more than welcome to pay me a litte visit. Bring beer. And now for the list;

Vaish: Shibs (a common friend who's motto is "when in doubt, trek") introduced us via e-mail, and we hit it off right away. For some reason, she calls me "Thambi", and refused to drop it even after I gently pointed out that I was two years older than her. One must take these things in one's stride, I guess, and I finally got around to calling her "Akka". Akka writes really well, has an awesome sense of humour, and in spite of having about a gazillion friends, finds time for all of them. I have no idea how. You'll like her.

m.: Another lady I've never met, and would love to. She has very strong opinions - especially on feminism, loves poems and arguments, is very well-read, writes really lucid essays, and has an great sense of humour. And she is surprisingly mature... especially considering her age. There. That's sealed my coffin. We travelling engineers like to live dangerously.

Brewtus: An old friend of mine, actually. We haven't met for about six years now, so I shall invite him, too. He's neck-deep in research, and is one of those brainy, disciplined, serious, no-nonsense people. At least, that's what we all thought, till in the final year of college, he went on stage and broke a few impressions. That's all I shall offer, you can get the gory details straight from the horse's mouth.

Shruti: Or, Shrutz, as she would have us call her. This kid is well-read, has opinions on everything - what are kids coming to these days, I really don't know - and is wickedly witty. Writes nineteen to the dozen, and is absolutely crazy to boot. Young blood, young blood. Hm.

Anurag: He's a big guy and would come over and strangle me if I did not invite him. All right, so we all hang out on weekends and have weird conversations and weirder arguments over beer, and although he calls everybody around the table schmucks (except for his wife, "who is nice", as he likes to repeat), we like him, and we humour him, because he takes awesome photographs, has a good collection of movies, and is bigger than any of us and would strangle us all if we do not. Oh, and reinforcing his weirdness, the latest conversation we had over the phone:
"Hey, Anurag, what is..."

"My age? 32. I'm five years older than you, you know? The next time we meet, you ought to touch my feet."

"...your plan for wednesday evening?"

Megha: Again, a lady with an amazing sense of humour. Her extensive knowledge of hindi cinema staggers the imagination. Quite the encyclopaedia on the subject, she uses it to maximum advantage in her write-ups. I really like what she's done to her page, and what I like the most about her is the underlying geek tendencies. Not the socially gauche geekiness, but the "Hey! Wow! Look at this code!" geekiness. The force is strong in this one.

Wheeeew. Lookit that. One of my longest posts, I think. Once again, sorry for the long absence, and I shall try to write something a little more readable very soon. But now, the time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say...

Weird people I know #2

2006-02-19T12:04:00.000-08:00

The phone rang. It was Anurag’s number, so I answered in my customary, bored-late-sunday-afternoon voice.

“Hey.”

“Hey, how’re you?”

It was Gina.

“Heyyy! How have you been?” The bored-late-sunday-afternoon voice is reserved only for friends who, without any provocation, send one-line mails telling me - and some other friends - that we are all schmucks. Gina, however, is nice.

“I’m good, oh, and this is Gina here.”

I assured her that I had not mistaken her voice for Anurag’s.

“So,” she went on, “we’re in Narayangaon, and we’re in the middle of a discussion, and wanted your opinion on something.”

I sat up. It’s not every day that people ask me for my opinion, and even if they do, they usually have an ulterior motive, like proving to friends and family that I have no idea what the hell the “India shining” project is. Sorry, was. A little wary, I assured her that she had my complete attention.

“Let’s say you’re stranded on an island with no food, along with me, Anurag, Arjun, Shrik, KP, and Sush. All of us die, and you alone survive. Who would you eat first?”

A year ago, I would have been a little shocked at Gina’s ‘ice-breaking questions’, as we now call them, and I’d have said, “Eh?” but one eventually gets used to these things. This time, I didn’t miss a beat.

“Let me see. That would be the person with the most amount of available flesh, so that I keep the number of people being eaten to a minimum, at least in the beginning”, I replied, proud of my logical, noncommittal answer.

“Come on! You have to come up with a name! Anurag seems to be the favourite here, according to all these guys. And Shrik says that you’d choose Anurag, too, because he would provide you with the maximum amount of protein.”

I explained that since I’d not seen any of them for about a month, it would be difficult for me to come up with an answer just like that. I also added that health food was good, but under such circumstances, one chose the well being of one’s sanity over a high protein intake.

“Okay, the most meat, eh?" she said. "That would be me.”

Now on an aside, before you people get the wrong impression, and before I get tied to a barbed-wire fence and get beaten up, let me add that Gina happens to be a very tall lady. Taller than me, I think, and it’s not every day I admit that, and I happen to be more than an inch taller than the average Indian male. And she has a normal sort of aspect ratio, so she may have a point there.

However, this put me in an awkward position, as any of you, who while talking on the phone with someone ended up telling him/her that there was a slight chance you might be eating him/her, would know. So I decided to make amends.

“Ah, but because I’m a chivalrous sort, I think I’ll bury you with your dignity intact and cross you off my list of choices.”

Laughter on the other end.

“Why, thank you, Senthil, very gallant of you.”

I graciously replied that she should be thanking my mother because she was the one who taught me manners and chivalry, including the commandment thou shalt not eat women.

We then went down the ladder in fleshiness, and found that the next rung was occupied by Anurag. This, I realized, was payback time. Schmuck, eh? Yep, I’d start gnawing on him for starters. Only under unmitigated circumstances, though - cannibalism does not lend itself naturally to me. We then concluded that Shrik was right after all, albeit for the wrong reasons.

“All right, see you when you get back. We’ll all go to Narayangaon again.” She then rang off.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is yet another proof of how weird my friends are. Haridwar, I am beginning to realize, is not that bad a place after all.

P.S. I have also been Tagged by Shruti and Vaish, and the tags require some thought, so ladies, I am working on them, please don’t hate me.

Uncropped crop?

2006-01-31T03:36:00.000-08:00

Long time and all that, eh, people? My apologies. I was on vacation - meeting family after ages and all that, and had to put in some frantic travel and work to make up for it. Anyways, I'm, as they say in Hollywood, back. Big as life and twice as bad, or words to that effect.
I also have taken loads of pics, which I shall be uploading periodically out here, until I feel energetic enough to actually write something.

I took these two pics at Haridwar. I was really bad at botany in school, and my younger sister - who is about eight years younger - was better at identifying the plants in our garden. So when my mum used to ask me to "water the crotans" I used to look up from my Tintin and give her a blank look till she said, "Oh. Go out the back door, take a left, and water the third plant from the corner."

So you'll forgive me if I don't have the slightest idea what these things are. My guess is that they are either blades of exotic grass that somehow grow to be about six feet high, or some sort of crop that people forgot to, heh heh, crop.

Anyways, that is not something that bothers me. It may well be jute for all I care. However, what I want you guys to tell me is: which one of the two pics do you think is the better one? I cannot decide myself, though I have repeatedly been kicking myself for not getting the composition of the first one the way I wanted. So. Plis be to vote? Explanations on why you prefer one over the other are welcome, too.

Pic 1: Title - "ear".

Pic 2: Title - "ears". Heh heh.

A word of thanks to Anurag - I flicked about two rolls of Fuji Velvia transparency film from him, and these are a few of the pics I used the roll for. Oh, and the details, if you care to know:
Camera: Canon EOS66
Lens: Canon 100-300mm USM
Film: Fuji Velvia 50 slide transparency

Swings of the Gods

2006-01-06T06:04:00.000-08:00

This time on new year's day, I was alone - stranger in a strange land sort of alone - and decided to spend the day in solitude and instrospection. I thus went to Rishikesh and took some photographs, and learned a valuable lesson: I need to practise taking photographs under harsh lighting conditions. Almost ALL the photographs I took that day came out bleached.

This one is one of the few that came out all right. Rishikesh is beautiful this time of the year, and the colours are really vibrant. This one is one of two suspension bridges across the Ganges, and is named "Ram Jhoola", or the swing of Rama. The other bridge is called "Lakshman Jhoola", after his faithful brother, who followed him into exile, leaving his wife behind. Which makes me wonder about long-distance relationships in ancient India.

Anyways, I digress. I realized that suspension bridges form great subjects for photographs - the sweep of their cables gives you a sense of majesty and grace that no other bridge can. I need to go back there and try out more snaps. Meanwhile, let me know what you think of this one.

I uploaded a slightly larger version of this pic, experimenting on how it looks on the page, and how it affects page loading time, so in case your page takes too long to load, please let me know, and I shall go back to the smaller pics.

Camera: Canon EOS 66
Lens: Canon 28-80 mm
Focal length: 28mm
Film: Fuji Pro 100
Aperture: f/16
Shutter Speed: 1/90 sec

We loves these bookses...

2005-12-25T07:27:00.000-08:00

It has been a long time since I actually wrote something out here, and I have this crazy project to blame, I guess. So even after deciding to write about this ex-army doctor I met here in Haridwar and his extreme affinity for all things alcoholic, I had not lifted a finger - or six (I'm a six-finger typist) - to write a post. So I probably can go so far as to say that it's thanks to Shruti here that I am lifting that finger - six, actually - to answer a few questions. Yep, another tag. This one, however, is pretty old, and has been taken up by every Tom, Dick, and Bihari around. So in the trend of keeping up with the Joneses, or in this case, the Georges, I nod my thanks at the lady who sits biting her pencil under the coconut trees, and continue.

All righty. This post, then, is supposed to give you a brief idea about my reading habits (Wodehouse) and probably a few writers (Wodehouse) who have changed the way I look at things (W.). Well, the way I look at books, at least.

If Anurag is reading this blog, this is the point where he would say to himself, "Heh. Let's see what the geek has to say about his reading habits." In fact, he fairly jumps at every chance to label me a geek. For example, the following conversation we once had over beer:

Anurag picked up my mobile and saw that I had Linus - that would be the chap with the blanket on the left side of this page - as the background.

"Hey, this is nice! Do you have Snoopy, too?"

I replied in the affirmative.

"Good, good. MMS it to me."

"Ah. I recently found out that Reliance does not enable MMS by default. Sorry."

"Aw. So how did you get this on your phone?"

I told him about the invention that has come to be known as the data cable.

"Heheh. Geek."

There have been numerous other occasions where he has, without any sort of provocation, proceeded to tar and feather me in public in this manner, and it is still a mystery to me as to why I continue to go and drink with the guy. But I digress, as usual. So, without much further ado, I shall look back at my life, and trying hard not to flinch, will try to locate the book-related memories and put them down on paper.

1) Number of books owned: Sitting out here in Haridwar while my books lie in Pune, this is a bit of a difficult task, but I would put the number at about 250, excluding the auto mags. There are a few shelves of my books lying around in my hometown as well, but those would be books like "Tell me Why/When/How/Whattheheck" and "A gazillion science questions you wanted to ask but were afraid of your science teacher" and the like.

A short note here about my mum - she has an eagle eye for dog-eared books that also have their bindings coming off, and I, in my childhood, have lost many such books to the evil hawker who takes them away and leaves buckets in return. Yes, buckets. Every time I had a bath, I was reminded of all the Indrajal comics/ Tinkles/ Tintins/ Asterixes/ DC comics I could no longer read, and have kicked many a bucket. Oh, hardy-har, yes, strictly literally. The memory still makes me wince. Some of those buckets were made of steel, see?

2) Last Book read: Currently reading "The Van" by Roddy Doyle. The last book I read would be "Carry on, Jeeves", by Wodehouse. For the third time, I think.

3) Last book bought: Oh, yes - this memory is still rather vivid. Back in Pune, I used to spend the weekends working at Barista, and - oh, hang on - not at Barista, I mean I was at Barista, but I was not working for Barista, if you know what I mean. Hammering away at keyboard and all that sort of thing. So there was this very interesting-looking girl working at the attached bookshop, and I sort of took a fancy to her, I believe. Eventually, I fortified myself with a capuccino, and walked across to her in the hope of striking up a conversation.What I was unprepared for was the thick american accent she replied in. I staggered back, grabbing a passing bookshelf for support. The book that came off in my hand happened to be "Eggs, Beans, and Crumpets" by Wodehouse, and I took it as an omen, reminding me of the joys of an unfettered life. Offering a silent prayer of thanks to Mr.Wodehouse, I immediately bought the book, walked out of the shop, out of her life, and into the sunset.

4) 5+ Books that mean a lot to me: Ah. Hm. Let me see. Tough one, this, but I shall attempt.

Pretty much everything written by Wodehouse: To borrow a simile from him, Wodehouse, like the measles, needs to be caught early in life. If caught at a later stage, the effects can be disastrous. Which was pretty much what happened to me. I was introduced to Wodehouse sometime in 2004, at the ripe old age of twenty-five, and the next few months were a blur of grabbing and reading every Wodehouse I could lay my hands on. I love everything about his work - his transferred epithets, his literary allusions (I learned more about Shakespeare from Wodehouse than from Shakespeare himself), and especially the give-and-take between the two Irishmen, Pat and Mike. Sorry, Bertie and Jeeves, I mean. Even today, after a bad day, I just need to pick up a Wodehouse and immediately feel boomps-a-daisy as billy-o.

The entire 'Doctor Who' series: I stumbled into the Blue police telephone booth that was the space-time travelling ship also known as the TARDIS when I was lazing around in the summer holidays after my tenth std., and I was absolutely taken in by the Doctor, his exasperated assistants, his sonic screwdriver, and their Bizarre adventures in space-time. I guess you could label it as juvenile science fiction, but hey, who wants to grow up?

The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien was a genius of epic proportions, pun intended. What-a-book! I desperately wanted to be an elf, and even learned to write my name in the elvish script. To be able to know what the local flora and fauna feel, to be able to see what fell creature flies a few leagues away... sigh.

Rendezvous with Rama: Arthur C. Clarke positively outdid himself with this book. Everything here is so plausible it's scary. And engineering and physics never looked so good as they did here. And whatever you do, do NOT read the sequels. They're sacrilegious.

Jurassic Park: In fact, a lot of Crichton's early works were amazing. I used to be amazed by the way Crichton fused fact with fiction and made it a point to write about a completely different field in every book. Even his introductory essays in each book were complete masterpieces. It broke my heart to read his latest, completely pointless novel centered around global warming. The man has, unfortunately, lost it.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: 42. Marvin, the paraniod android. The willoughmying blanket. Ford prefect. Beeblebrox. The total perspective vortex. This book is absolutely brilliant, and absolutely crazy.

Dragons of Eden: I wish I had Sagan's grasp of science. This book is a brilliant history of the evolution of human intelligence. I know now that my revulsion to lizards is nothing sissy: it's an evolutionary artifact, in gobbledygook.

Apart from these, I absolutely love comics and comic strips, and discovering "Peanuts" has been a life-altering experience. Charles Schulz is the undisputed God of comic strips, and if you are not satisfied with 42, you will definitely find all of life's answers - and a few questions you never thought of asking - in the panes of the thirty-seven thousand-odd comic strips that he drew every day of his life, for fifty-two years.

Ummm... I think I've pretty much covered everything, and if you've read this far, boy, you are patient, and I owe you a drink. No, not you, Anurag. And not you either, Shrik. No, Kakkar, forget it. I mean the others. And in case I've missed any book out here, I shall let you know. Till then, tinkerty-tonk.

At work...

2005-12-12T11:58:00.000-08:00

This is one of my favourite photos. Among the ones I have taken, that is. What I like about it is the lighting, the depth of field, the medium, and the way these guys ignored me. Of course, you would soon be ignored, too, if people at work are used to seeing you fiddling around with a camera every day... familiarity breeds good photographs.

The composition leaves a lot to be desired, though. Lots of space at the top empty for no good reason. Sigh.

Camera: Canon EOS66
Lens: Canon 28-80mm
Film: Kodak BW4ooCN

I realize I have not been writing too much of late... and I have much to write about. Time is definitely not on my side...

Contrast

2005-12-06T07:43:00.000-08:00

I always like stark pictures. Black and white, I believe, is the best medium for stark, contrasting images, and whenever I get the chance - and can afford the twice-as-expensive black and white film - I try to take some (stark, contrasting) pics which I hope come out the way I like.

The keyword here, though, is hope. They almost never do. This one is about halfway there, but I had to bump up the contrast to get rid of the dull look that I always get when I get my darker images processed. A curse on all film labs.... anyways, I ramble. Do scrutinize this image, and let me know what you think.

Camera: Canon EOS 66
Lens: Canon 100-300mm USM
Aperture: f/4.5
Exposure: 1/10 sec
Film: Kodak BW400CN (aka bloody expensive film)

Girl Talk

2005-11-29T07:08:00.000-08:00

Sir Galahad and the Scooterette

2005-11-23T14:06:00.000-08:00

Rescuing ladies is one thing. Rescuing ladies astride scooterettes, however, is a completely different affair, and whoever has underestimated the above task has had at least one opportunity to swallow his pride, stoop down to sweep the shattered fragments of his ego under the carpet, and head for the himalayas. You would thus look more kindly at me, then, if I told you that I hesitated the other night, when a reversing sedan threatened to unceremoniously add a rather pretty lady to the general landscape at the Khadki railway crossing. I was in a position to judge that peril was slowly moving her way, but just when I was about to swoop down and carry her off to safety, I saw something that made me abort the launch: she was on a scooterette.

Those of you men who have never been on a scooterette, this is a good time to look heavenward and thank your favourite deity for sparing you the ordeal. In fact, it would not be too much if you went to the nearest place of worship and distributed food among the needy. Those of you - again, I address the men here - who have, you have my sympathies. Never was a machine so perfectly designed for crushing the male ego. To this day, when I pay a visit to the old hometown, I have often taken ten-minute walks in the mid-day sun when the only other alternative was to take my sister's scooterette.

I first encountered this blasted piece of machinery when walking over to my parked motorcycle at FC Road, about four years ago. I was young, dumb, and brimming with the confidence that so separates the young and the dumb from the rest. Thus, when I spotted a girl struggling to start a teensy - in fact, I remember even thinking of the thing as 'cute' - scooterette, I decided to lend a hand. I had, after all, had practice kick-starting a 156cc engine without the option of a decompression valve. In fact, on one occasion, I had even started a 350cc engine with a decompression valve, though I gave as violent a start as the machine did when it started. Anyway, coming back to the present, or rather, the past, there was this girl trying hard to punch a hole through her starter button, and realizing that this might soon end in her starter motor being handed to her in a casserole, I decided to intervene for the sake of the poor machine.

All right, so the girl was cute, too. But my thoughts, believe it or not, were all for the poor starter motor. So off I went and politely enquired if I could be of assistance. The girl looked at me in an appraising sort of way that seemed to say, "Oh, so you think you can, can you? I'd like to see you try!" and handed me the machine.

Ten minutes and ninety kicks later, I was swearing under my breath - what remained of it, that is, wiping the perspiration off my glasses, and rubbing my sore ankle that had, at every fifth kick, been hit by some part of the undercarriage or the other. Telling myself that if I ever visit one of these scooterette-manufacturing places, I'd make a beeline for the chap who designs the kick-starters in these machines, and let him have it, I turned to the girl, who, incidentally, had been joined by her rather amused-looking, also-cute friend, and asked her one of those vital questions that is born out of the strong line of reasoning we learn at engineering college.

"Are you sure there's enough fuel in the tank?"

The girls seemed to giggle among themselves, and the amused-looking friend asked me to step aside. Continuing to smile sweetly at me, she did a few things to the machine that looked suspiciously to me like witchcraft, and voila - we had lift-off. That is to say, the engine purred. Like those cats that those witches keep around them. To say I was astounded would be putting it mildly - I was positively rocking about the heels.

"Thank you!" came the chorus. I know a sarcastic chorus when I hear one, and this was definitely one. Refusing to be fooled by the sweet smiles, I stiffly waved off the thanks, and I believe added something about carbon in the spark plug, and strode away with as much dignity as a shattered ego and a bruised ankle would allow.

It took me about a week to recover from that one. I kept away from FC road for about a month, and I think I grew a beard for a while, too. The memory is hazy. You know how the mind tends to block out these traumatic episodes.

So you would understand my hesitation when I saw this scooterette-riding girl in a bit of peril. However, my hesitation was only for a moment. I nimbly jumped off my bike, ran up to her, and put my best foot forward.

"Erm... needanyhelp?"

I took care, though, to stay on the leeward side of the machine, away from the kick-starter. You should, too. Unless you're a girl. In which case a muttered 'abracadabra' under the breath would do just fine.

Boxes

2005-11-17T09:51:00.000-08:00

I admit I did not at first notice these boxes lying around in a corner, until Anurag pointed them out. I'm glad he did.

Camera: Canon EOS 66
Lens: Canon 100-300mm USM
Film: Kodak Max 400

I have a bike, you can ride it if you like...

2005-11-16T01:43:00.000-08:00

I remember watching a movie titled 'BMX Bandits' as a kid, and - I was a kid, mind you, so look at yourself at that age before you sneer at me - all I wanted to do was ride my bicycle down the stairs, up the walls, down banisters, and off cliffs in general, which is what all the characters in the movie seemed to be doing. I don't remember there being a plot, but then, I was too young and too dumb to even care. The bicycles we absolute dream machines - they all seemed to have tyres made of bubble gum - the colour was one thing that made us draw the connection, and the adhesion of the tyres to any surface the protagonsists cared to ride on was the other. And they came in different flavours like banana, cinnamon, and spearmint. Every little boy's dream come true.

This ye olde and unsteady chap I spotted at the flea market brought the memories flooding back. There even was a set of banana-flavoured wheels available as an optional extra. Yum.

Camera: Canon EOS 66
Lens: Canon 100-300mm USM
Film: Kodak Max 400

Exploded view

2005-11-15T00:06:00.000-08:00

...of what, I really cannot say. Any ideas? The mech engineer in me says it's a bevel gear, but there are bevels and bevels of gears...

Camera: Canon EOS 66
Lens: Canon 100-300mm USM
Film: Kodak Max 400

I should be more disciplined and note details like focal length, aperture, and shutter speed. But for now, this is all I have. Any purists out there, kindly adjust.

Street Photography #1

2005-11-14T05:18:00.000-08:00

Juna Bazaar is an old flea market in Pune which opens only on Sundays, and where you get anything from half-a-century-old video cameras to rusty motorcycle parts. I don't know if this bike was on sale, but it definitely looked like parts of it had been sold off.

And I have Anurag to thank for initiating me into street photography. The most fun way to blow away cobwebs, time, and money. Except, you know, we had to wake up early...

Owls, Larks, and Lenses

2005-11-13T01:18:00.000-08:00

"Most good photographers stop taking pictures after seven in the morning."

My stomach sank.

Anurag is one of those old-school chaps who think that to live life to the fullest, one should start by the completely pointless activity of waking up early. My father would love him. In fact, one of the earliest arguments I had with my dad was when he insisted that I wake up in the morning, and - of all things - tend to the garden.

Now don't get me wrong - I'm all for the green revolution, planting more trees, and making the world a rainforest, especially since taking photographs in a rainforest would be fun, but I could never pick up the shovel and start digging so I could plant a plant, or tree a tree, or whatever it is that horticulturists do. Even now, in the comfort of - where am I - ah, the coffee shop, when I think of gardening, my mind goes numb, my body aches, and I have horrible flashbacks of the time when a quiet sunday afternoon reading session was rudely interrupted by parents who had finished with the day's gardening and required my assistance to "add finishing touches", which in my family stood for "carry piles of compost out the gate, all the way to the end of the road, and dump it in the dumpster".

Thus, life found my dad and myself in a rather awkward situation - I had a father who considered his garden to be his first-born and his son to be a freak of nature, and my dad had a son who, for some reason he could never understand, preferred to sleep away through the morning when the lark was on the wing and the snail on the thorn. As in all households where the head of the family is an avid early-rising horticulturist and the tail a sensible chap who knew exactly what mornings are for, there was a bit of a strain in the otherwise cheerful and warm atmosphere. often, this strain culminated in in my dad taking potshots at me with scathing remarks like, "this would never have happened to an early riser", as I lay in bed with an toothache. No, we managed to save the tooth. Root canal. Painful. I have never shown my tricuspids to a dentist ever since.

Getting back to the point at hand, Anurag made one of those statements that made my stomach feel like it had hit an iceberg at full steam.

"The best time to take photographs is in the morning, before seven. After that, the light becomes a little too harsh."

That did it. Time to kiss nature and street photography good-bye, I thought. From now on, it's going to be indoors in strictly controlled conditions. Not very exciting, but a man has his limitations.

However, there have been situations in my life where events take a turn so as to render me awake in the morning. Most such events involve working through the night, or watching movies through the night, or working while watching movies through the night. So it happened that when I was stationed in Haridwar for almost a month, I found myself in one such situation. So Kakkar and I decided to do some carpe diem-ing and take off for the ghats in the wee hours of the morning, so we could watch the sunrise at the banks of the ganges. And I remembered Anurag's advice in time, and took my camera along.

And grabbed some tea on the way back. In fact, it was quite an efficient trip, and we even managed to get back to the hotel soon after dawn, which is, undoubtedly, the time of the day when men of reason go to bed.

Unless you want to spoil a perfectly good day by waking up and tending to your garden.

...and then there was light

2005-11-02T18:11:00.000-08:00

Taken at Guchu Pani, Dehra Dun. This place is also known as Robber's Cave, and is home to a rather strange sight - a stream of water goes underground and resurfaces for air a few metres away. However, I had neither the agility nor the stupidity to clamber over slippery rocks to check it out for myself, risking a broken neck, a barked shin, or worse - a broken camera lens. So you would excuse me for not venturing that far. I never could understand these Robber-type personalities. Except for the Beagle Boys.

Sensitive dependence on availability of onions

2005-10-19T15:01:00.000-07:00

The butterfly effect. A beautiful term that is a nicer, simpler way of saying “sensitive dependence on initial conditions”. For those not in the know, this term evolved back in the times when a weather forecaster named Lorentz realized, using a primitive computer and a set of equations that he formulated to model the weather, that long-term weather forecasting was a pipe dream. To put it dramatically, a butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo today could alter storm systems in New York next week.

I have often thought about the butterfly effect in my own life... what if I had not sat next to that chap during my engineering college counseling? What if I had been allocated a different room in my first year of college? What if my eyesight had been better than it was during the medical test of my first campus interview? What if a professor in Austin had not mixed up my name? What if I had found the bigger onions that Sushim wanted and not the little ones that were eventually available this evening, when we settled down for another communal dinner?

Okay, maybe the last one has not had a tremendous impact on my life... yet. But maybe it would. Maybe I continue to cook sambar, get really good at it, and maybe there is this girl... but wait. As always, I believe I have done it again. Starting off in the middle of a story, I mean. It seems to work for Tarantino, but it would not do me a lot of good to be that presumptuous, would it? So I shall begin, as all by-the-book writers do, at the beginning.

These days, we have been indulging in a lot of communal dinners. By which I mean that Sush and KP do the cooking, while Shrik and I do the eating. Which was an arrangement that suited me so perfectly that I even didn’t mind washing the dishes from time to time.

So as it happened, we were issued a command by Sush to get some Tomatoes and Onions en route to his place. I also got myself a set of AA cells – I was getting tired of switching cells between my TV remote and the remote of the VCD player, though I was getting to be reasonably fast at it. In fact, you could say that if there were a state level competition on the shortest time elapsed between pausing a movie and switching channels on the TV using only the remote controls and one set of AA cells, I would beat the opposition to a standstill. If any of you readers attempt to rival me at this, a word of friendly advice would be – keep the rear covers off, and perfect the technique of ejecting the cells using a single flick of the index finger and the thumb. It’s not easy, but you’ll get there.

There I go again. Now where was I... ah. The onions. So Sush wanted me to get these huge onions, which were nowhere to be found in that particular shop. I hunted around a bit, and found this bunch of the small, teardrop-shaped onions, and since an onion by any other name would be just as pungent, I decided to substitute B for A and hope Sush does not notice.

Now Sush is this bright sort of chap who has made a career in software that makes three-dimensional models, so he immediately noticed the discrepancy in size, and made an astute, penetrating observation.

“These are small onions.”

I explained. Sush, however, was not satisfied.

“But these will take ages to peel.”

Shrik saw that Sush, however good his culinary skills were, had a lot to learn as far as onions were concerned. He intervened.

“No, these are easy. Just peel them and throw them in the cooking-pot. Swish.”

“And they go well with Sambar, too!” I added.

“We’re not making Sambar.”

“I didn’t say we were. I just said they go well with it.”

One thing led to another, and finally Sush rebelled from all cooking activities for the night, leaving Shrik and yours truly in charge of the kitchen. And thanks to the above statement about Sambar, we found ourselves thinking, “not a bad idea, that...”

Except for one small hitch. Neither of us knew how to make Sambar.

Thus I did what all grown, tough men do in the face of a crisis. I called mom.

“Hi ma, we’re making Sambar, and realized that we don’t know how to do it, so can you give us a few pointers?”

“It’s eleven in the night! You’re going to make Sambar NOW?” My mum has always had the constant nagging feeling that somewhere in my upbringing, she has gone horribly wrong.

However, she was up to the task, and gave us instructions, pointers, and useful thumb rules, which, of course, had to be translated for Shrik into engineering-ese: “If the food is liquid in nature, the chillies need to be cut longitudinally. If the food is solid, then the cuts need to be transverse.”

So after much slicing and dicing, leaping away from hot splashes of oil, arguments on whether transferring B to A would be more optimal than transferring A to B, and ‘adjusting’ the proportions of ingredients till we realized that the vessel was too full to accommodate any more adjustments, we were finished. With the Sambar, that is.

Sush, the only culinary expert within a ten-metre radius, peeped into the cooking-pot while we waited for his critique.

“Not bad. This actually smells like Sambar.”

Which was as good as it could get. So, with dinner under my belt (quite literally), I returned home, and sat back, thinking of the butterfly effect and reasoning that if there is this pretty girl out there who is looking for a guy who can make Sambar on impulse, and at the same time dispense with useful cooking thumb rules, then I would definitely have storm clouds gathering on the horizon. And all because the shop did not have large onions. What can a man say when something like that really happens?

I’ll tell you what the grown, tough men say: Thanks, ma.

What's the railroad to me?

2005-09-29T09:05:00.000-07:00

What's the railroad to me?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a few hollows,
And makes banks for the swallows,
It sets the sand a-blowing,
And the blackberries a-growing.

-- Henry David Thoreau

I was once travelling between Haridwar and Rishikesh, when I came upon this railroad. It later struck me as rather odd that this, in the middle of nowhere, was the most beautiful sight I saw in that trip.

So in case you find yourself travelling between H and R by road, and you see a flash of steel among the breaks in the woods that flank the road, I strongly urge you to stop, walk down to the railway tracks, and - as Mr.Davies puts it - stand and stare.

And while you do, try not to catch the train to Dehra-Dun in the small of your back.

...but why not 42?

2005-09-17T14:44:00.000-07:00

The Phone rang. Kakkar received the call. It was Shrik.

"Hey."

"Hey Hey." This is Shrik's customary greeting whenever you greet him with a "Hey."

Kakkar was in an upbeat mood, so he took the conversation further.
"Hey hey hey!"

"Hey hey hey hey!"

"Hey hey hey hey hey hey!"

"That's not right. One 'hey' too many."

"I double-promoted myself in 'Hey's."

...and so on. Which goes to show the kind of weird company I keep.

But that is not the subject of this post. The subject of this post, as the title effectively fails to convey, is the latest tag doing the rounds. Dhammo has thrown the steel-lined gauntlet at my face, challenging me to write a story in fifty-five words or less. So after straightening my nose (which had already suffered recently thanks to a steptococcal infection, which I suspect is latin for "nose swollen so badly the patient could not wear his glasses"), I bent down and picked it up. The gauntlet, I mean.

So I started writing one. Two hundred and forty-nine words later, I realized one thing. I needed a beer. No, sorry, that is just a thought that keeps popping up at the back of my mind every few hours or so. What I really realized was that it was tough, keeping a story short. By this time I had started doing some research for my story, and one thing led to another till finally I found myself looking at the Wikipedia entry on James Tague. I then decided to keep that story for a rainy day, and started with a clean word processor. So, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I present to you the next fifty-three words.

“Is that it?”

“Yep.”

“You’re sure? Only ten?”

“Yep. Admirable, isn’t it? I think I’ve covered everything.”

“I was being sarcastic.”

Thunder.

“Only kidding – keep your hair on. Right, then, I’m off. Thanks.”

“Careful round the last bend. You might get a bit of a shock.”

The rest, as they say, was religion.

-----

Now I throw my gauntlets at Brewtus, Hari, Shruti, M., and Ramya. En garde!

Die, brain cells, die!

2005-09-05T13:49:00.000-07:00

"WelcometoMcDonaldssirwhatwouldyouliketohavesir?"

The lad at the counter was smiling, so I assumed he had not abused me anywhere in the sentence he just spoke. However, it did not help. I wondered what he was likely to have been saying. My mental machinery cranked itself into motion, and I had the following insights -

Crink...CRUNK...Kerblonk....sorry, that was the minor cold-start problem I usually have....now where am I...ah, McDonald's...at the counter, to be precise...did I say anything to antagonize the boy? No...and he's smiling, see? Yep, there is that, of course. So what the hell did he say? How does it matter? Just pretend you're the irate customer and just ask him for the burger and fries. He can't argue with that...

The infinite wisdom in the suggestion struck me, and I did precisely that.

"Erm... one Chicken McGrill, with medium fries, please." I smiled back for effect.

"Thankyousirwouldyoulikeyourburgerwithorwithoutcheesesir?"

Once again, I was stumped, but I thought I heard the magic word "cheese" somewhere. Ah, something about cheese. My mental machinery needed oiling, but it did okay that day.

"N-no, no cheese, please." I did not smile this time, so as to not seem predictable. Unpredictability is a good thing. Keeps these counter-types on their toes.

"Wouldyouwantsomecokewiththatsir?"

"No, thank you." As you can see, I was a fast learner in pattern recognition. I did not do four years of engineering for nothing.

After a bit of chitchat, in the course of which all I understood was that the poor chap needed a cash counter to subtract 67 from 70 and give me Rs.3, I grabbed my tray and staggered out, briefly stumbling over the bunch of kids who were involved in a game that looked to me like "knock the tray out of his hands" or something equally endearing.

Replaying the incident later in my mind - I often replay incidents later in my mind, chiefly because incidents are few and far between in my life, and also because I always have the vague feeling that I never grasp the gravity of a situation the first time - I realized that the problem lay with too much protocol. Too many established procedures. Say this to everybody on that side of the counter. Smile. Repeat total. Use cash counter ALL THE TIME.

One can imagine. It numbs the brain. What these chaps need to do is have more fun, instead of throwingpeopleoffguardwithextraordiniarydisplaysofbreathcontrol.

Making a mental note to drop in a suggestion the next time I went there, I left the matter at that.

But this sort of thing is not an isolated case. The other day, Shrik and I decided to go down to the nearest mall to make some 'sensible' purchases. Shrik wanted to buy a steam iron, and I wanted to buy some mattresses. About half an hour or so later, I was at the counter, handing over one of those sports T-shirts that are probably only worn by geeks so they could look sporty (who else would fit into an 'Asian size M' T-shirt?). But that was not why I bought it. I bought it because it was made of some sort of fabric that looked really functional. Really textured and all that, so that when the tag claimed that "this T-shirt absorbs moisture a gazillion times more efficiently than the average T-shirt", you knew, just by looking at the material, that it would absorb anything. Even lava.

So I bought my nth blue T-shirt. The mattresses were important and all, but the mall did not have any, and this T-shirt absorbs moisture a hell of a lot more efficiently!

But that is not my story. I tend to, like I have done in previous posts, digress. So as I was saying, I was standing at the counter, handing over my debit card and the T-shirt, and the chap on the other side flipped my card over, and saw that there was no signature on the reverse of the card.

"Could you please sign on the reverse side of the card, please?"

One thing at a time, I thought. First, thank God they breathe normally. Secondly, what was that again?

"Sign? On the reverse?"

"Yes, sir - it's for your security. If your card is stolen, then the thief will have to duplicate your sign."

I thought I spotted a flaw in this logic. I am not normally very astute, but I have my moments.

"But if I do not sign on the reverse, then whoever steals my card will not know what signature to duplicate."

"No sir, this is for our security."

Not the most dazzling argument I have come across, but I let it pass. We were getting late for a lunch date of sorts, women had invited us, and that does not happen every day. The women inviting us, I mean, not lunch. Actually, lunch does not happen every day either, thanks to my nocturnal life, but that is not the point.

"All right, all right." I resisted the urge to ask him how he knew I was not the thief. A certain vacancy in his eyes told me that I was in danger of being taken seriously.

"Now, can you sign on the slip, too, please?"

I complied.

The chap then picked up my card, the transaction slip, and - I am not making this up - compared the two signatures.

A nod in my direction. Approved.

More clutching at merchandise and staggering out followed. Shrik, who had, incidentally, bought for himself a denim jacket, was visibly shaken, and clutched at his jacket for comfort. It was probably a good thing he did not buy the steam iron... clutching at a steam iron may not have calmed him very much.

"My God. He actually did it. Compared the two signatures. My God. I had only read about such people. I thought it was one of those urban legends. It really happened."

Trying to be cheery, I ventured an explanation based on Calvin and his transmogrifier, but something in his expression told me he didn't quite buy that.

More replaying of incidents followed, much to my depression, and finally, thanks to my excellent grasp of economics, beahavioral dynamics, and the psychology of the individual, I made the following decisions:
- Avoid MacDonald's.
- DO NOT argue with anybody on the other side of mall counters.
- Use hard currency as a medium of exchange.
- Focus. Buy those mattresses.
- Test absorptivity of T-shirt.

Unless, of course, I have to watch a movie at Inox and only have time for a quick burger. In which case, I'll take a deep breath, and rushinandbuyaburgerwithoutcheesemakenoconversationandgetthehelloutofthere.

...dig that hole, forget the sun...

2005-08-20T06:57:00.000-07:00

...and when at last the work is done, don't sit down, it's time to dig another one....

Pink floyd. Cheerful fellows. Always had a song for any occasion in life. Well, maybe not life in general, but my life, yes. And right now, the song in my life is: Breathe.

So you would understand, and hopefully forgive, the lack of posts... but I promise ye, come September and I shall attempt to regale you with stories about Pinnochhio and how I, for a brief interval, found myself channeling his spirit. No, not mentally, but to the great amusement of friends and well-wishers, physically.

In the meantime, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the greatest cartoonist of all time: Charles Schultz.

p.s. Hint, hint.

Cameraderie

2005-08-03T14:18:00.000-07:00

Since I do not feel very chatty, I'm putting up a few more of the pics my shiny new SLR has turned out.

This one is from my bedroom window. My bedroom has a rather large window that faces the east, which is rather unfortunate, as sunlight comes streaming in a few hours after I hit the sack. Thus I sleep in my living room, unless there is something vitally important to be done early in the morning, like saving the earth from mutant Praying Mantes (is that correct grammar - one mantis --> many mantes? Considering the axis --> axes analogy, it probably is), or the neighbourhood from stampeding Emus, or lying in wait to catch the son-of-a-whatnot who keeps stealing my newspaper. Then I shift to the bedroom.

But I digress. As I was saying, this snap is from my bedroom window, taken one such morning. Shrik had very considerately lent me his 100-300mm zoom lens, and would have lent me his tripod as well, but for the fact that when he unwrapped the long-unused structure, it looked "like someone has been using it to hit rocks", as he tells me.

The next one is at Pune University. Now this is one of my favourite spots in Pune, especially 'Shanti Tapri', the poor man's Barista, where I've had multiple cups of tea, sitting and talking about life in general with Lavi, or reading a book, or generally just lazing around. Like Koregaon Park, the campus is thick with trees. The last time I went there, armed with clunky camera and all, I ducked through the underbrush in front of the statistics department on a whim, and came upon this interesting specimen.

Like I said, I'm not feeling very chatty...

Mass defect

2005-07-26T14:15:00.000-07:00

I am not one to make excuses to skip my gymming. However, one does not want to go to the dietician after about a month of absence (I was travelling), and show a loss of two kilos. Dieticians are a rather fussy lot, and they take it as a personal insult if you turn up at their doorstep like the prodigal son, only a lot more leaner and - they always miss this part - meaner. Not if you've signed up for a weight gain programme. The last time this happened was over a weekend, when, after a week's hard work, eating four meals a day, drinking soy milk till it oozed out my ears, and lifting weights until I could no longer brush my teeth the next morning, I'd gained one whole kilo, and earned an appreciative nod from my d., only to find that lazing about, skipping meals, and eating popcorn at multiplexes over the weekend had lost me that kilo.

"What! You lost one kilo over a Saturday and Sunday?" Like I said, she was the easily excitable sort.

"Er... yes, strange, isn't it?"

"HOW?"

I sorely wanted explain to her a phenomenon called "mass defect" in atomic nuclei, wherein it is observed that a nucleus is found to weigh slightly less than the weight of the protons and neutrons it is composed of, the difference in mass being converted to binding energy, which keeps all those protons from exploding outwards and ricocheting off the walls of the dietician's room, but decided against it at the last moment. Something in her manner told me that she may not be appreciative of the subtle way I injected education into humour. So I did the next best thing - I shrugged, and resigned myself to the usual sermon.

So you can imagine my apprehension at going to the gym after one whole month of eating random stuff on the go, none of which was on the dietician's pet list of 'healthy' food, which was food that made you gag and want to roll up into a foetal position. I was absolutely not prepared to go and listen to "you have lost two kilos! How?" again.

So I decided upon a brilliant idea - I would eat well for a few weeks, and then go there with a smile on my face and a few extra bananas down the hatch. I re-examined the plan for flaws, found it foolproof, and launched myself into it.

Two weeks later, I was forced to go on a trek by deranged friends, and was subjected to a few embarrassing episodes:

Episode 1: Loveleen suddenly turned to me and asked, "How much do you weigh?".

Now, if you're a guy and you're underweight and in danger of being lighter than the petite girl who asked you this question, you would know how my insides squirmed.

If you're a girl, sorry - I'd have to start with an explanation about how the male ego is structured, and that, milady, is the subject of another post.

Episode 2: Anurag patted me on the back at the foot of the hill, while I was having my chai.

Now this was probably meant to be a gentle sort of gesture, how we guys tell other guys subtly, "buck up and finish that tea, the hill's not going to wait all day for us!", but the man measures about eight feet by three feet, has played football seriously, and I suspect has felled oxen with careless flicks of his wrist during his undergraduate days. Thus the seemingly gentle pat on the back rocked me about my foundations, spilled my tea, gave me a whiplash injury, sent my glasses flying, and so forth.

While I was wiping tea from my face, I heard Loveleen gently chiding Anurag, saying that he was a largish sort (this, I was acutely aware of), and that I was a thin sort (this, too, I was acutely aware of, but did not care to have it mentioned too often), and he should be more careful. All very well-intentioned, but if you're a guy, you would know that this is not the happiest of occasions, definitely not worthy of mention in your diary, except that guys don't maintain diaries, at least not us beer-drinking, mountain-climbing, bike-crashing, arm-wrestling types.

Anyways, this renewed my enthusiasm to get the most out of that weight-gain programme. So I decided that after a week in which I would regain the weight I lost at the trek, I would bite the bullet and step over to the gym, and show the dietician a thing or two.

Ten days later, Ballu walks up to me, picks up my wrist, and said, "Senti, you are really thin."

After I set him right about his manners and explained to him that picking up people's wrists, especially without prior permission, is not a very polite thing to do, I decided to wipe the smirk off his face the civilized way: I challenged him to an arm-wrestling match.

Now, I was sure that I would win, for two reasons:
(i) I had righteous anger working for me, and
(ii) I had watched that Stallone-starrer, Over the top, and he had not. This gave me the edge as far as technique was concerned.

I lost.

Tomorrow, I shall go to the gym, sneak a ten-pound plate out, and throw it at Ballu's grin. And step on the scales while I'm sneaking the plate out. That'll teach the dietician, too.

Hold on to my book while I climb that hill

2005-07-19T13:00:00.000-07:00

Sometime last Thursday, I was once again faced by a Kakkar with a smile on his face, a smile that has often not boded well for me.

"We're going trekking this weekend. Rajmaachi."

Now the last time I went on a trek was well over three years ago. A fort called Torna. Horrible place. Horrible trek. There were at least four different locations en route where I wanted to lie down and die. I staggered up the hill, staggered around at the top with the view swimming in and out of focus, and tumbled back downhill, pausing only to slip and fall into a stream, an unfortunate accident that is still enacted by close freinds and colleagues at parties, get-togethers, and conferences, with more details being added each time.

That was my first trek, and - I had sworn to myself - would be my last.

You will appreciate, then, when I tell you that come Saturday and I was clambering up some hill again, the persuasive powers of the man who informed me of the trek. My emotions that day had ranged from ecstacy at getting my hands on The Half-Blood Prince; dismay, frustration, and anger at finding out at page 90 that the trek was going to happen, after all; alarm when I saw Anurag hauling a backpack that looked like we were going to the Himalayas; confusion when I found out that we were going to Rajgad and not Rajmaachi; and finally, resignation, when we finally got down to the act of climbing those godforsaken slopes.

Twenty-five hours later, back in my apartment, reading page 91 of The Half-Blood Prince, I felt a lot older, more thankful to be alive, and slightly wiser, for having realized the following things:

1. It takes all kinds of people to make the world. Some of these people like climbing up and down hills, for reasons not fully understood.

2. People who made those tracks on those hills had absolutely no idea of the term "as the crow flies", unless that crow was heavily drugged.

3. The Pearly Gates would probably be preceded by a stairway that looks somewhat like this:

4. Camping out-of-doors is an amazingly funny, eye-opening, and bizarre experience, if done with the right sort of people. This right sort, oddly, might even include the strange kind of people mentioned above.

4 (a). Wriggling out of a tent in the morning and stretching out to a view that makes you feel you have already brushed your teeth, washed behind your ears, and dunked your head in cold water, is something one needs to experience at least once in life, even if that means climbing up a godforsaken hill.

5. Flatness of the earth (all right, the slight curvature, if you're one of those purists) is a quality that is oft overlooked, and not appreciated enough.

6. Beer tastes a lot better on top of a hill.

6 (a). Ditto cheese sandwiches.

7. Mordor was grey and black till the movie added the red and spoiled it all.

8. A controlled descent is a hypothetical concept, existing only in theory, and in practice, performed only by those strange people who have been introduced elsewhere in this post.

9. When a girl demands to be mentioned in your blog, you had better comply. As they say, hell hath no fury...

10. I am not going on another trek for the rest of my life.

Rather embarrassing, this...

2005-07-14T23:47:00.001-07:00

I can think of a few things worse than going through the process of writing down what is presented in the following lines - like maybe Hara-Kiri, crashing my bike (again), or sitting through a Spice Girls/ Backstreet Boys/ Britney Bpears concert... but I have been - what's that technical term they use again - ah, Tagged... from the most unexpected of quarters, Shruti - a firm believer in the old if-I-suffer-then-so-shall-ye ideology. A good lesson in self-defense - never let that left fist drop from its guard. However, one must try to be the preux chevalier, and thus I shall oblige. So here it is:

A small note to greenhorns - this particular 'Tag' is supposed to make me answer a set of questions that have been carefully designed to embarrass the writer and the writee... er, sorry, the reader. Right, then - Geronimo!

Three Names I Go By:

Senthil - mostly my family and people who've just met me
Senthil Kumaaaaar - My mum, when she needs me to:
(a) Wake up in the morning (shudder),
(b) Go buy groceries,
(c) Own up to some disaster I've caused.
Senti, *&#$@!, etc - Close friends, colleagues, my boss, etc.

Three screen names:
Duh... me very 'net un-savvy...

Three Physical Things I Like About Myself:
My fingernails - a very observant girl once told me they have a manicured look...
My double-jointed thumbs - excellent for thumb-wrestling, and
My uvula - very lively. Very unlike me.

Three physical things I don't like about myself:
My overall aspect ratio
My wrists
The lack of enough lines on my forehead... even when eyebrows are at full deployment.

Three parts of my heritage:
Filter Coffee
Carnatic Music
Indrajal Comics

Three things that scare me:
Suddenly finding myself 'in charge'.
Public Speaking.
A wet patch on the road just at the blind part of a switchback I'm taking at 60 k.m.p.h...

Three things I want in a relationship:
Space. Lots of space.
Lots of tickling, going by the advice of Frederick Altamont Cornwallis Twistleton, fifth Earl of Ickenham.
No nasty remarks about my bike. Those scratches add character.

Three statements about you which are not all true or all false:
I'm vaguely embarrassed by corny dialogues in movies.
I love the smell of Napalm in the morning.
I can squeeze through four-inch-wide gaps between tables.

Three physical things about the opposite sex that appeals to me:
Sharp features.
Expressive eyes.
Huggability (a vague concept, but translates to - as a friend of mine puts it - a smallish, cute girl).

Three things I want to do badly right now:
Go out and photograph something.
Have masala chai at the station.
Start drawing that cartoon strip I've been thinking about.

Three places I want to go on a vacation:
Yellowstone
The Great Wall - China
Ladakh

Three kids names i like:
Nonu Singh
Abhimanyu
Shweta

Three things to do before I die:
Learn the guitar
Ride my bike all over the country
Rock-climbing

Three essentials in my day-to-day:
My bike
My glasses
Scrambled eggs

Three things I am wearing right now:
Glasses
Jeans
Floaters

There. I hope y'all (especially YOU, lady!) are satisfied. Now, please promise you people will come back to this place in a few days, and I promise I'll put up something interesting. Shcoutsh' honour.

Misty mountain hop

2005-07-07T14:22:00.000-07:00

Misty mornings are about the only mornings I can tolerate. Being mostly nocturnal, I am of the firm belief that dawn is the time of the day when men of reason hit the sack. Sounds of people bustling around, radios blaring encouragement to people who want to ruin their lives by running out their doors before lunch, sounds of traffic... no, morning is definitely not my time of the day.

However, a misty morning is different. For instance, it ensures that the sun does not take me by surprise by suddenly jumping out from behind the nearest hill with a "Gotcha!" and a blinding set of rays to boot. Nope, misty mornings are relaxed periods of diffused light, wet grass, quiet birds, and beautiful hillsides.

Now, going over to a beautiful hillside at half past five in the morning, even for a guy like me, is the easy part. Photographing it, however, as I realized when I got my prints, is bloody difficult. I had ended up underexposing almost every picture I shot that morning. All of them ended up looking more or less like this:

Another thing I am not too thrilled about when I pull the rather prominent-looking camera out in public, is the amount of attention it attracts. I wonder how people deal with it. I feel dashed uncomfortable, and mostly end up taking hasty shots, which, unfortunately for my ego, end up looking a lot better than my carefully set-up ones.

Anyways, so here I was, taking a lot of bad photographs without realizing it, and walking down the road, when I came upon this group of aged chaps who seemed to be engaged in some sort of early morning prayers. Now I am still unclear about the ethics of photography, and wondered for a while on the problem of taking their pics without disturbing them. You see, it would not be nice to take their pics without asking them, and if I were to ask them , it would mean disturbing them from their prayers, and if I wait around till the end of the prayers, then the whole point of the exercise is lost.

So while I was still trying to work this out in my head, while clicking away at passing undulations in the landscape, when I heard something of a "Hoy!". Turning around, I saw that the prayers had ceased and the group was looking at me with a little interest. One of them beckoned at me to come over.

"Which paper do you work for?"

Now this is one question that has surprised me on an earlier occasion, too. I have friends who have bigger and more prominent-looking cameras than I do, but they have gone through their entire lives without anyone asking them this question, while I, within a month of purchasing the camera, have been asked this question twice. The last time, I'd lied through my teeth, telling a bunch of rowdy-looking youths that I was freelance and all that sort of thing, but it's not the sort of thing you do with a group of respectable-looking elders.

"Oh, no, this is more of a hobby."

Apparently this was something they heartily approved of, and they displayed their approval with encouraging cries, stopping short of thumping me on my back.

"So what do you do?" Elderly gent #2 asked, when the uproar had died down.

"I'm an engineer."

More displays of approval. Rather surprising, since these days you can't throw a brick in Pune without hitting an engineer of some sort. However, I refrained from asking them what all the excitement was about.

"Will you take our photograph?"

"Oh, sure!" Nice of them, I thought. Now if only they wouldn't look at the camera.

"Try to relax. As you were. Ignore me..."

Unfortunately, coaxing a subject into relaxing for a photograph is not the easiest of things, and there you are:

I should ride down to that place again sometime, and give those nice people this photograph. Some of them had even invited me to their homes for some morning tea. And maybe I'll give the misty morning one more shot. Literally.

U - turn

2005-06-19T03:26:00.000-07:00

"FIFTY KILOMETRES?" I exclaimed.

"This is Bombay, my friend. The big city. Fifty kiliometres by road. But if you take the train, you'll reach the place in forty-five minutes flat!" Bachha (not his real name) waxed eloquent about shortest routes in the city after a year of hopping from train to train, travelling to work and back, going for dinner, going to a movie, going to the loo, and so on. How people lead a life in this city has always been a source of amazement for me. True, I had lived in Bombay as a kid, too, but I had never had to catch a local, my school being a few kilometres' walk from my apartment, and yours truly never being the columbussy type who wonders what lies yonder the great oceans. Nope. School, back, a stack of books, and some coffee was all I had in life, and was quite happy with the pace.

When my dad got transferred from Bombay to Tirunelveli, I had a bit of a problem adjusting to the new lifestyle... to not sitting next to girls in the school, to have the teacher address me as "Baaai!" (boy), to Chemistry and Sanskrit, to speaking in Tamil in school, and so on and so forth. The only thing I liked was the slow life. This continued in college, and out on my first job, I was delighted to find that Pune, too, had the laid-back life of a small town.

But there were small shocks to be faced in life, and this one was when I had to stay in Bombay for a few days on work. Thus, at the beginning of this post, you found me asking Bachha about the most optimized means of commuting from the guest house to the workplace.

"Bachhe, I am NOT going by train. Wild horses won't drag me to those horrible things."

But our man, apparently, had thought this out as well.

"Chill. I've just asked a friend of mine who travels along the same route, and he has a plan for you." Leaning over the kebabs and the biryani, he said conspirationally, "Take a first-class ticket. It costs a bit, but at least it's better in there. Now the train you will take will go from..."
... and he outlined a plan that, briefly explained, goes like this. I needed to go from A to B. But the train was bound to be crowded at A. So, I catch a train going in the opposite direction, to C, C being close to A. The advantage was that since C was the last stop, people would get off, the train would reverse direction and start travelling towards B, and I would get a place to sit.

Now, the idea was a bit sneaky, and wold probably be frowned upon in Pune, but Bombay was Nature, red in Fang and Claw, and these were survival tactics. As the old saying went, "All is fair in love, war, and Bombay", and I found myself warming to the idea.

The next morning, after figuring out where the ticket counter was - each atation here is unique, they have ticket counters hidden away behind false paan shops, and you have to twist a turnstile and punch the fake paanseller in the nose for the secret door to open and reveal the ticket counter - I went over to the platform, astutely figured out where the first-class bogie (not bogey, you gross people - I meant the carriages) would stop, and waited in the manner of a calm commuter with nerves of steel. I looked around at the edgy, jumpy crowd milling around and chuckled to myself. Little did they know how easily one could travel, if one had the right brains for the job.

The train arrived.

I remember once, when we were holidaying in Goa and body-surfing waves, I had just stood up, shaking water from my eyes and ears, trying to collect my breath, when the mother of all waves hit me amidships and knocked me end over end, sprawling onto the coarse sand. I remember a brief feeling of disorientation, and the next thing I knew, I was on the sand, listening to hyenas. Upon shaking more water from the ears, the hyenas took on the more recognizable notes of the chaps who called themselves my friends. Curiously, Bachha was one of them.

What happened on the platform next was quite similar to that experience. I had the feeling of being lifted by a monstrous wave, and was deposited with minimum dignity somewhere in the bogie's bowels, with other bodies piled on top. The train then gave several lurches - one would almost suspect it of laughing - and moved on.

All right, so maybe first class isn't all that classy, but wait till the terminus, and then it's all nice and cosy for you, I told myself, giving the old pep-talk.

The terminus came.

The train stopped.

The train reversed.

We headed towards point B.

The astute reader may observe that there is a crucial event missing in the chronology presented above. That of the passengers disembarking. Not being very obtuse myself, I noticed this right away. This puzzled me for a bit, but it all became clear when the chap who had his elbow planted somewhere between my tenth and eleventh rib told the chap who was using the both of us to rest about 40% of his ample weight, "See? I told you. We should've caught a train headed the other way, got off at point D (a station between points A and B), caught a train coming back, come back here to C, and then we'd be sitting by now, on our way back. Now we have to stand all the way."

If I had had enough space to stagger, I would've staggered. What sneakiness! The snakes in the grass! My God! I exclaimed silently. Everybody in the blasted train was taking a U-turn so they could get a place to sit.

"Ha ha ha ha Hee hee hee!" went Bachha, when I told him about how his plan had turned out and instructed him in detail on what he could do with his plans. "You caught that train at eight! I told you to catch trains before 7:43! No wonder - rush hour, my friend! Ha ha ha!"

I took a taxi back to the guest house that evening. A bit on the horribly expensive side, no doubt, but one would not want to repeat the performace of the morning, while lugging around a laptop that had the tonnage of a small neutron star. Also, I could stretch out and relax in the back seat with a paperback.

I may have found The Poseidon Adventure more exciting a day earlier, but now it seemed a bit tame in comparison. To my own.

The Good. Just those.

2005-06-12T03:49:00.000-07:00

...because I would be too embarrassed to show you the bad and (shudder) the ugly photographs from the first roll on my shiny new EOS 66. As usual, the pics I took almost impulsively came out better than the ones I painstakingly set up. If I were in my usual chatty mood, I would go on and tell you about how I have always screwed up on stuff that I have taken great pains to prepare for, and how I have been very lucky on stuff I did on impulse, but I have to sit and prepare for some real intimidating stuff I'll have to face in the next three days (and thus screw up, going by history), so here goes...

The one below is at Bandstand, Mumbai. One of my favourite places in the city, and I try to go there every time I visit Mumbai. I underexposed this frame a bit, in the hope that it would look more dramatic, since the sun was not in its setting-mode yet. Now that I look at the pic, I wish I'd had something in the foreground. Something to show that this was Bandstand. For now, this could be any seashore.

The second one is at a Barista in one of the multiplexes in Pune. I was waiting for a few friends there, had time to kill, the place was almost empty, and I have always loved their ambient lighting. Very mellow. I tried to increase the depth of field here, I think my aperture was down to f/11. I had to thus increase my exposure to 2 secs. Unfortunately, I'd left my lens hood on, which is not a good idea in wide-angle shots, as you can see.

Comments, pointers, criticism, please. Right, then - I'm off.

Obscura on the Camera

2005-06-05T14:49:00.000-07:00

In an attempt to bring back more....uh...what's that technical term they use... ah, zing into my life, I finally bit the bullet, made that trip to Bombay and purchased the Canon EOS 66, the SLR camera for the poor bloke. Right, then - camera, cpl filter, hood, uv filter (this one was for free), bag (this, too), film loaded - I'm all set. Now all I need is some talent. Not the ancient egyptian currency, ha, ha... I often crack these jokes to myself - not many people, I noticed, appreciate my jokes, and one needs to keep the self happy - and was probably smirking visibly at this one when a fellow passing through the shop looked down at the clunky unit (I'm not being over-critical here, just that I had gone to the place with this chap who bought a camera which looked - and weighed - like the strip of chewing gum I was carrying) and paused.

"Hey, how many MegaPixels?"

This threw me for a bit. It was one of those questions people ask without thinking, and suddenly your whole life flashes before you... sorry, hang on - I was going to use that part in a post about my road accidents. No, your whole life hits the "pause" button, and you suddenly realize that you belong to the previous generation.

Back in my time, when people saw other people buy cameras, they asked intelligent and mechanically-oriented technical questions like, "Why don't you use a camera obscura like everybody else?", or "Hey, are you sure this isn't broken? The lens came right off!", or, for the really technically-minded, "Huh? SLR camera? What be that?" and so on. In fact, back in my childhood, when I was young and dumb and used to read Reader's Digest (okay, it wasn't all that bad then), I once came upon this article on "Doc" Edgerton, who, among other things, drank a lot of coffee, and photographed drops of milk falling on it (the coffee).

No, seriously, this chap was a bit into photography and invented stuff like the strobe light, which apparently caused a lot of scientists to exclaim "Eureka!" and run off naked into their labs. Okay, okay. The strobe light freed up the camera from the mechanical limitations of the shutter by eliminating it altogether. So by using a dark room and illuminating it with flashes of light from these strobes, scientists could find answers to such questions like "Is your aim spoiled by the recoil from the gun you just fired?", "Exactly in what way does a soap bubble collapse?", and "Who has been taking that last tub of ice cream from the back of the freezer?"

But I digress. So as I was saying, I had come upon this article a little early in life, and when I asked this uncle of mine who is a zoologist and an enthusiastic photographer - a combination which all the bats in the temples of Madurai strongly resent - about this strobe light thingie, he looked at me with something close to shock in his eyes. No, sorry, that was the uncle standing next to him, who had just wrestled my last toffee out of my hands, and was in the process of popping it into his mouth. My zoologist uncle, no doubt out of years of observing animals in the wild, instantly saw through my ploy.

"Very nice. Okay, I'll let you hold my camera. But be verrry careful."

And that was that. Hold on. How did I get here? I was talking about the - oh, blast! Sorry, folks, there I go again. So what I was saying was that in my time, people knew about convex lenses. We watched solar eclipses by looking at the image on the wall through a pinhole. We blew soap bubbles. I even tried to make my own soap bubble mix, and caused a minor setback in my mum's laundry routine. In short, we were all children of the earth, with no more sophistication than the summer sessions of "Super Mario", something that strangely baffled my dad for some reason. He had some preposterous idea about going out in the sun and playing. Ha.

And after all that, this young whippersnapper looks up at me and asks, "How many megapixels?"

I drew myself up to my full height. Tact and finesse, I thought to myself. Handle it with your usual tact and finesse. He's just a young kid - he knoweth not what he sayeth and all that sort of thing.

"Er, ah... it's, er... you know... the film SLR... 35mm and all that... "

I thought I heard him snort, I definitely saw him raise an eyebrow, and then he passed out of the shop, into the sun.

We followed, after a brief search for my friend's shiny new tiny digital camera. It was hiding behind its charger.

That thing I did...n't.

2005-05-27T15:04:00.000-07:00

"So what is the craziest thing you have ever done?"

I balked at the question. These life-scanning questions have always taken me off guard. Thankfully, I have not been faced with many of them in life, but whenever I have, the whole room seems to do the shimmy, and I feel the urge to grab the table and gasp, "Can you stop the room, please? I'd like to get off."

It's not that I have not done many crazy things in life (well I haven't, but that's a different matter, as you will soon see). In fact, my worst nightmare was when, as a graduate trainee in my first company, I was sent alongwith thirty other trainees to this personality development programme, where I was asked to, among other things, draw a sketch on a newspaper, walk around a room blindfolded, give impromptu speeches, play a guitar minus the guitar and music, and - the painful part - answer questions like "What is the happiest moment you've ever had?", and worse, "What has been your greatest achievement to date?"

The point that I have tried to make - and have completely missed - in the previous paragraph is that I somehow find it a little disturbing to answer questions that require me to scan my life in the space of a minute and pick out local maxima in the curve related to the question asked. Very exhausting. I am amazed that people actually manage to do this in the space of a heartbeat. My mental machinery, when subject to such loads, goes: craziest thing....now let me see... what can that be? Riding a bullock-cart in the middle of the city? No, that wasn't exactly a bullock-cart.. it had leaf springs and stuff. Pulled by a bullock, no doubt, but probably does not qualify. How about that Diwali night when I inadvertently set fire to my uncle's house? Nah, the fire was doused before it actually reached the house... it was the shamiana, and who knows, maybe it would've burned the shamiana off, without harming the house. Nobody waited to find out... my relatives are rather hasty. And it wasn't crazy. Stupid, yes, but not crazy. Nopes, that can't be it. What about the college fest where I played the only Bond girl with a moustache? Hmmm... maybe. But it was a movie spoof - you're expected to play crazy there. And playing crazy when expected to play crazy = not crazy. So there goes that. I knew I should've gone on that stupid trek to Rajmaachi. That would've definitely qualified. Can I just pretend... no, there's Kakkar - he was on that Trek. He even rode his bullet up that track. Maybe I should've bought a bullet, too. Could've joined RoadShakers and died a wonderful death. Bloody heavy machine. Sigh. How about -

By which time the people around the table had gone on to other topics, so that when I came out of my reverie, I believe I may have caused a bit of a jar in the conversation. Kakkar, I think, was saying something about Bob Dylan.

"He may sing it badly, or he may not sing it at all - in fact, he may have just talked the song, but it works for me! I just love the way he sings."

"I once sang 'American Pie' out loud and offkey at Thousand Oaks after the DJ had switched off the music. We were begging him to play it, but he refused, so. The whole song. Halfway through, everyone in the pub was begging for the torture to stop." My moment of glory, and I intended to bask in it.

This caused a slight break in the conversation, but the people I drink with are very good at this sort of thing. The break lasted probably for a few milliseconds.

"Really? Alone?"

Anurag, now, is the bright sort of chap who gets to the nub of the thing faster than quicksilver, and this probing question was from his corner of the ring. Rather unfortunate for me.

"Er... actually, there were four others with me...in fact, Kakkar was there, too. He kept going back to the line where he meets the girl who sang the blues..."

"Janis Joplin." said Gina. How she remembers these things is a mystery. "That was supposed to refer to Janis Joplin. The King was Elvis, the Jester was Dylan - he took the thorny crown from the king, there's Lennon, reading a book on Marx..."

"Really? I thought - " and conversation resumed.

And that was that. Twenty-six years, and not one crazy thing. Should try riding my bike on the divider in front of Inox. Here cometh the weekend.

Heyyy - hang on - there was this night when my roomie (not anymore, though - the chap got married and dislodged himself from the apartment) and I pushed a scooter along the highway all night, right up to the next morning, because his was the 1985 Bajaj super model, the kind that does not have keys (or turn indicators, and his model also lacked a taillight, and soon after we got on the highway, a headlight), and he did not want to leave it around. It did not matter that the scooter seemed un-start-able by any mortal power. Seven hours trudging through the rain. Does that count?

If it doesn't, you can find me on that divider.

Sinister habits

2005-05-16T10:50:00.000-07:00

"How much for the bunch?"

"Five rupees."

I held out the money.

"You're an educated boy, right?"

Now this was not a question one would expect from the local jasmine-seller (different from a florist in that this man sells mostly jasmines and other flowers that look suspiciously like jasmines, at least to the layman), but in spite of (a) being in my early-teens and (b) inexperienced in dealing with potentially hostile people like the local jasmine-seller, I was known to maintain my sang-froid in sticky situations.

"Yes," I replied stiffly.

"Don't you know how disrespectful it is to hand over money with your left hand?"

I looked at the offending limb and saw that the man was right. Later, replaying the incident over in my head, I realized that it was the fault of the tailor, who kept the wallet pocket behind the right trouser leg. But, then, trousers hadn't originated in South India, and wherever the damn things had been invented, I am positive that it was not considered a violation of the local etiquette to use the left hand in day-to-day transactions.

Coming back to the present, (or rather, the past, if your frame of reference is today), I mumbled an apology, handed over the fiver, wishing that it had been four-something, so I could've told him to "Keep the change, you filthy animal!", and bicycled home, in time for my mum's evening pooja, for which the flowers were needed.

The problem that I had often faced as a kid was shifting customs. The years spanning my primary education - and some of the secondary, too - were spent in Bombay, which for a kid like me was a city of crammed-together flats, friendly neighbours, slightly strange friends (which kind of happened all my life), and holi! However, being as I was from Tirunelveli, the summer vacations were spent there. Now Tirunelveli at the time was as diametrically opposite a city to Bombay as could be. Roads free from traffic (and tar), hot, dry afternoons, lazy evenings, and the occasional irate jasmine-seller.

So much for the romantic descriptions. I'm all for the works, but I tend to get carried away a bit and the reader is left lost in the ravine. So, I'll get back to the story at hand. Now I was in the ravine, and... wait. No, that's a different story. Erm... ah, yes. Since I was flitting between the two cities, I often had problems with the local etiquette. For example, in Bombay, if a kid were to address anyone on the street, it would be "Uncle" or "Aunty" depending on the apparent age and the apparent gender of the addressee. Now this is all right as a kid, but once you sprout stubble, it is not advisable to call a slightly older-looking chap "Uncle", or worse, call a lady "Aunty". Disastrous effects are almost assured in the latter case. Probably why the Army trains kids within its influence to call anything that moves "sir" or "ma'am" depending on the case.

In contrast, in Tirunelveli, any stranger is "Anna" (elder brother), or "Akka" (elder sister). Which was not too difficult, considering. Also, since the language was also completely different, I could learn, without confusion, politeness in both languages. However, actions speak louder than words... whoops, sorry, I mean, actions are tricky things, lacking a language segregation. A harmless signal for hitching a ride at region (a) can be interpreted as a jeer in region (b), often resulting in injury to the surprised hitchhiker.

Similarly, we South Indians are a little touchy about using the right hand for the right sort of actions. Preserving the decencies of narration, I will refrain from mentioning the origins of the custom. So it was rather unacceptable to hand over stuff with the left hand, pick food with the left hand, write with the left hand, change gears in the scooter with the left hand, etc.

Okay, so I was only pulling your leg about that last point. But you get the hang of it. In fact, this was so engraved on the young and impressionable minds of the region that they were more thorough on this concept than on the concept of right and left. When I was teaching the kid of a family friend to ride the bicycle, I almost dropped both in shock when I said, "Turn left", and the girl paused, brought her right hand up to her mouth a couple of times in a food-eating gesture (accompanied by something that sounded like "num, num", which, I believe, was how she thought she sounded when she ate), nodded her head, said "Ah! Okay!", in the manner that Tycho Brahe may have exclaimed when in the middle of his class, he suddenly realized what was wrong with the concept of platonic solids he was working on, and proceeded to turn left (the kid, not Brahe).

Unfortunately, I was not similarly gifted, and this aspect of my otherwise irreproachable manners was often brought to light at my grandma's dining table, when I reached for an idli from the pile in the bowl with my left hand.

Whack.

"Ow!" I muttered, rubbing my wrist.

"Never use your left hand to touch food. Don't you know that -" and, depending upon the age and the religious knowledge of the admonisher, I would receive a crash course on the goddess of food, her quirky natures, etc. I would nod numbly, reaching for the idli. My grandmom makes amazing idlis, which sublime in the mouth, making you forget any amount of physical abuse your body has endured, like slaps on the wrist.

Whack.

"Now what?" I hissed. Idlis or no idlis, there is only so much a boy can take.

"Echhi kai!" - now, there really is no euphemism for the translation, but to put it mildly, the term refers to a hand which has deposits of saliva on it, owing to the fact that when one eats with the fingers, one needs to insert a few fingers into the oral cavity and close the mouth over them, and then withdraw the fingers to prevent the food (especially curd rice) from spilling out. Anyways, though the eating of idlis does not entail the actual insertion of fingers into the oral cavity - at least, it wasn't my style - there are people who are a little finicky about the thing.

"So I can't pick up the idli with my right hand, and I can't pick it up with my left hand. Great."

Now, back home, my mum used to cleverly overcome this minor point by using a large spoon of sorts, which in turn could be held by the left hand, if you're not a purist. However, that turns out to be a rather huge "if".

"What am I here for? If you need an idli, ask me. I'll serve." And an excess of idlis appear on my plate.

The customs are slightly quirky, but I forgave my ancestors. One has to take the rough with the smooth, especially if the "smooth" part includes those idlis. If any of you happen to pass through Tirunelveli, drop in to my Grandma's place, and try them out. And keep that left hand away from the table.

Goodbye to all dieticians

2005-05-04T10:55:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow morning, I am supposed to have, as soon as I wake up, some lukewarm water with honey and lemon, a couple of dates, walnuts, almonds, and some sprouts. This is to be followed up after half an hour with three slices of brown bread, some cottage cheese, a whey protein shake, more sprouts, one egg white, and umpteen other things that I would include if I wasn't so dead bored of reading my dietician's sheet.

I had not met a dietician in my life till about two days ago, and the one I met made me wish I'd maintained that status for a much longer time. They are quite a singular category, if they are mostly similar to the one I met. Shrik tells me that dieticians are to be kept at arm's length, and made allusions to a dietician who apparently terrorizes the protagonist in Wodehouse's "The indiscretions of Archie" (which, incidentally, is available online - for FREE!), but even without his advice, there is no way I would talk to a dietician longer than necessary.

To start at the beginning, the Lord said, "Let there be light!" And He saw that the light was good, and... wait, got carried away a bit there. Now where was I... oh, yes, the beginning. It's like this: I have been grossly underweight for the past twenty-five-odd years (apparently I was kind of healthy till my first birthday), and I finally decided to attack the problem head-on. I thus joined a weight-gain programme at a nearby gym... for the fourth time. However, this gym had what all my previous gyms lacked sorely - a dietician.

Feeling pretty much like the guy who has spent the week leading to his appointment with the dentist brushing thrice a day and flossing at traffic lights in the hopes of reducing the effects of three years of dental neglect, I walked into her office, thanking my lucky stars for the recent vacation and the good home-cooked food. Unfortunately, like with the guy meeting the dentist, the effect was microscopic, not to be discerned with the naked eye.

Thankfully, she did not comment, and went straight to the questionnaire, which had questions like "What time do you wake up?" "How many chapatis/slices of bread do you have for lunch?" "What was the average surface area of those chapatis?" and other probing enquiries about my personal life that I have never had the courage to disclose to my closest friends.

Finally, moving to the end of the questionnaire, she asked, "What is your mood when you eat?"

Now this had me stumped. I am used to reading when I eat alone, which is quite often, so I guess it would depend on what book I'm reading at the moment. I tried to explain that my mood had less to do with the food and more to do with the entertainment, unless of course I was having really good south indian food, especially curd rice and -

"Shall I write 'okay'? Your mood is 'okay'?"

My discourse on the subject of mood swings was brought to a grinding halt.

Two days later - today - I was told to pick up my customized diet chart, the gym being all about personal attention given to the customer. I entered her office again.

"Hi!"

"Hi... (consulting chart)... Senthil, get on the weighing machine."

Now this was a little unexpected. I had been weighed in for the records a few days back, and here she was, asking me to kick my shoes off and hop on the scales again. Must be for eliminating errors caused by local seismic disturbances, I thought, kicking off my shoes and hopping on the scales.

"So what's the weight?" She asked.

I told her.

A frown creased her features. "It's reduced. Why has it reduced?"

After recovering from the initial shock of seeing a drop in weight after a week of shoveling in mum's food, I reminded her that she was the dietician and that I had joined the gym to find an answer to that very question, and had already spent extravagant amounts of money on it.

"Where is your diary?" She snapped.

"What diary?"

"The diary I asked you to bring. You're supposed to write details of what you ate in it."

"I was not asked to bring any diary." Accusations are taken better when made in the passive voice.

"I told you - ah, anyway, write down the list of stuff you ate today."

I wrote.

Another frown. "This is not what I mentioned in your diet."

I agreed with her, saying that she was probably right, and asked her to give me my diet sheet so that I could make a comparison myself.

"But I gave you the diet sheet."

The penny dropped, in both places at the same time.

"You probably have me confused-"

"Ah, I got you mixed up-"

"-with someone else!"

"-with someone else!"

"I'm so sorry, it was another guy, and he looked exactly like you, and he, too, had joined the weight gain programme!"

I remarked coldly that if he had looked exactly like me, he had to have joined the weight gain programme.

"Oh, no, I didn't mean that..." embarrassed silence.

But in the end, she has had the last word. Printed. On the diet sheet.

If the diary she's given me had had a 'remarks' section, I'd mention in it today's dietary observation: Whey protein shakes are made from rotten eggs.

King Bruce's spider

2005-05-03T11:30:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm back... decent vacation, that... except for the weather, missed trains, and a few other things I shall post about later, maybe, in a moment of weakness. The important thing is, I am back... with another attempt at rhyming 'moon' with 'spoon'. Whoa - I know, I know, but a man has to try, try, and try, and then give up.

However, to people who still bother coming here, rest assured that my next post will not attempt to be lyrical.

Shells, rigids, and a trailer

Ten metres. The trailer stretches
From end to end, without the cab.
Umpteen sets of engineering sketches
Were all I had; that, and my lab.

Not really a lab, but more or less-
Master FEM, my tool for the job,
"Model the thing now, don't make a mess,"
Was what I was told, with a pat on the nob.

I meshed and I meshed, through night and day
Section create, connect each node.
Chassis, floorboards, panels, all lay
Assembled, at last, I applied the load.

Normal modes and linear statics;
Not too much sweat, myself I told -
But hark! The shadow of dynamics
Loomed overhead, I ceased to be bold.

I curse, I swear, I rant, I rave,
At my computer - it always ignores
The plight I'm in, one foot in the grave,
It cares two hoots - at times, it snores!

Finally, 'tis done, 'tis finished, the worst
Is over now, no errors, says the log...
Now for the report, I tell myself, but first
Things first, it's time for a blog.

Confessions of a failed poet

2005-04-16T08:11:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a few poems of late, and as with everything else I've ventured into, I started thinking that it's quite easy, writing poetry. My childhood experiences refute this opinion, but of course, I am smarter now than I was in the past... or so I thought. So I tried, ... and tried... and tried... and this is all I could come up with.

Now, some of my friends seemed to like it, but I am not sure if it was for fear of hurting my feelings. Thus I have to turn to you people - shoot. I'm all eyes. Harsh criticism is invited. I throw myself at the mercy of the jury. Here goes:

Confessions of a failed poet

I wrestle, I wrangle,
To squeeze out an idea,
My fingers entangle
On the keyboard, my dear.
A poem to write - a piece of pâtisserie
Definitely is not, I tell you, mon chérie.

The "inner eye", I sorely lack;
And to moon with spoons, hardly the knack.
The spring in a step, the mildewed rose,
I never could describe, let me go back to prose.

- Senthil Kumaran

Psychobabble

2005-03-25T09:10:00.000-08:00

Wishy one moment, washy the next.
Have to work, want to blog.
Want to watch a random movie, have to finish work.
Book tickets, cancel them.
Transient analysis on one computer, optimization on the other.
Walk out to have dinner, come back with a pack of Maggi.
Reading The Gold Bat, choose The hitchhiker's guide for dinnertime.
Want to call this girl I used to like, end up calling an old college friend.
Feel like listening to fresh new songs, can't bear not listening to the old ones.
Hate my laziness, love not having an ambition.
Thirsty, want to eat dry biscuits.
Want to be coherent, break out into nonsense.
Want to blog, have to work.
Washy one moment, wishy the next.

Gremlins

2005-03-24T03:22:00.000-08:00

One would not expect inanimate entities like electricity or the weather to have a sense of humour, but trust me, they do, and they are forever playing practical jokes on me. In fact, one of the reasons I am here now is because of that great practical joker - electricity.

Now, if you are in Pune, you would know that there are these three-hour power cuts five days a week. We thus equipped our UPS to supply slightly more than three hours' power supply for two computers in the office. And well, the diabolical sonofanelectron ensures that it stays away from the circuits - four four and a half hours - till one (I switched off this one in a bid to outwit my aggressor), and then the other computer conks off, thus dumping a solve running on it. And then, when the cooling fans in the CPU come to rest, and my curses cease to bounce off the office walls, back comes the electricity, and don't tell me I was only imagining the gleeful cackle under the conduit wiring. That was when I ditched everything - for a while, at least (my bosses read this blog) - and turned to my Blog for comfort.

At home, the most common prank is in the form of a power cut when I've just entered my apartment with my packaged dinner. Then begin a series of chaotic events I have come to call "find the plates, candles and matchbox before the food becomes cold and soggy". I stumble over the odds and ends strewn across the place - shoes, books, newspaper bundles, the occasional cockroach trying my socks on, et cetera - attempting, in vain, to find the candles in the feeble light of the ancient Panasonic GD75's LCD display. I seriously think my candles are also involved in this little joke, because each time when the power is back, I think of the most logical place to find the candles, store the things there, and even attempt a dry run with the lights off, to see if I can really find them in the dark. After all this, the candles simply scuttle away on the backs of those cockroaches I mentioned, or roll off into the recess between the kitchen stove and the wall, or find a way to disappear into tears in the fabric of space-time, until my food gets cold and soggy.

After finally locating the candles, lighting enough of them around to be able to read (I cannot eat alone, so I always carry a book around to kill time and the taste of bad food, something that the waiters in the restaurant close to the office find very amusing) , I settle down with my latest novel, and try and chomp down the cold, soggy daal-chaawal and scrambled eggs which taste like the hen never, ever sat on them. And without fail, - and I am not making this up - when I have swallowed the last morsel with superhuman effort, I hear the familiar, contemptuous buzzing of the fluorescent tube just before it floods the living room with light, seeming to say, you fell for that again! How thick can you get?

Sometimes, just for variety, the power would go off unexpectedly, just before I press my office clothes in the morning (I finally got ahead of this one by joining a company where I am not required to wear formals), and after I'd selected the least wrinkled shirt, donned it, tried ineffectually to "rub" the wrinkles away, and finally preparing for the final sprint down the stairs and the screaming ride down to the office so I could swipe in on time, the power comes back just when I'm flipping the switches off.

And that is just one half of the story. Wait till I tell you about the weather. Oh, the weather.

Sci-fi gripes...

2005-03-16T12:20:00.000-08:00

I recently read Rama II, the sequel to Arthur C. Clarke's timeless classic, Rendezvous with Rama, and found it a bit of a let-down. It had none of the awe-inspiring elements that fired up the imagination as frighteningly as Rendezvous did. I cannot recall any work of Science Fiction I have read which overwhelmed me as much as the original book, published way back in 1973. It was science fiction in its purest form - with the alien artifact - Rama - occupying centrestage throughout the book. No obligatory villains, no heroes - at least, not the stereotypical ones, and no creepy aliens leaving a trail of slime. Just the passive, fifty-kilometre-long cylinder hurtling toward the sun, and the incredible mysteries that lay inside it.

The execution of the book reminded me of another of my favourite Science Fiction works - this one is a movie - Close encounters of the third kind. Though the movie is not as awe-inspiring as Rendezvous, there are many common elements, the most striking one being the way the extra-terrestrials are depicted throughout the movie. Till the end , we are unsure whether the ETs are malevolent or benevolent, just as we are unsure about Rama. I liked the movie for the same reasons I liked the book - everything is so well-knit. Take away the setting and you are left with nothing.

On the other hand, I also like movies like Gattaca, where the futuristic setting can be changed to a contemporary one without seriously harming the movie. Movies like Gattaca succeed because of the way they unobtrusively use the sci-fi part of the story as a backdrop. The movie is not about the protagonist getting to fly to Titan, it is about the triumph of his spirit, against his own physical shortcomings, as well as the prejudice against his kind. If you have not watched this movie yet, watch it, if only for the inspiration.

However, more often than not, meaningless drivel is presented on paper and on celluloid in the name of science fiction. Rama II falls into this category. It merely presents the alien spaceship as a backdrop against the petty struggles of a few humans. Not unlike movies like Screamers, Event Horizon, Alien, etc. where the futuristic setting is merely in order to introduce a new environment for the characters to get killed in. Now I admit that I did enjoy the claustrophobic effect of the spaceship in Alien, but I would never categorize it as a science fiction.

And then there are movies like Minority Report which have an excellent premise, but the director seems to want to show off - transparent displays, organic-looking robot probes, the strange new Lexus... all of which distracted me, and served to unnecessarily increase the running time. Not to mention the Star Wars 'prequels', where Lucas seems to be silently screaming in every frame, "Look, I can do this, and that, too!". A far cry from the almost-spartan-in-comparison look of the original A new hope.

Books with promising premises like Timeline, The ghost from the Grand Banks, 2010:Odyssey two, Prey, and other half-hearted attempts by otherwise good authors hurt all the more because you can see how excellent concepts have been ruined by slipshod writing. And unlike movies, as far as books are concerned, I am yet to see a sequel which lives up to the promise of its predecessor.

Thus, what remains is a handful of books and even fewer movies which would pass the criteria of pure Science fiction - The epic-like 2001: A space odyssey, the open-ended time paradox of Twelve Monkeys, the virtual reality of the first Matrix, the documentary-like record of the threat of The Andromeda Strain, and Contact, with its half-scientific, half-theological arguments, to name some. And each time a good science fiction book is made into a movie, I fervently hope that they won't over-dramatize it and cater to the PG-13 audience, and am often disappointed, and sometimes, shocked, like I was when I watched the movie adaptation of Sphere. Over time, it's become my favourite example of "books that should remain books".

I hear the movie adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama is scheduled for release next year. Mr.Freeman, please don't alter the script...

Doodles

2005-03-09T09:45:00.000-08:00

In an earlier post, I have explained how I have been plagued with the lack-of-concentration problem. When I was a kid getting some primary education, I have often drifted off, and have had the misfortune, when the mists cleared, to find myself looking into the angry eyes of the history teacher.

"Boy, are you drawing in my class?"

Looking down at my notebook, I realized that I had done it again - drawn a vase (minus the flowers - I dislike flowers, much less actually drawing them) on the corner. The light source in the drawing was, as usual, above and to the side of the vase, thus enabling me to shade the vase asymmetrically, in an attempt to hide the fact that I always have had a problem with drawing symmetrical objects. The shadow seemed a bit too short and thick... if I could just-

"BOY!"

This cry was usually followed by a sharp pain in my right earlobe. Another note would be scribbled in my diary, and my mum would then look through my notebooks, textbooks, the last few pages of my diary, there would be some amount of strain in the household that evening.

My mum has always been rather artistic - a talent that sadly skipped me and passed on to my younger sister, who is putting them to good use - she's learning to be an architect, and God help the skyline of Chennai. I, on the other hand, have inherited my father's style of drawing weird cartoons and some of his sense of humour. I still remember the day he was trying to demonstrate how easy it was to draw a cartoon - I was about eight, my sister was to be born in another month or so, and my father took a sheet of paper, a pencil, drew a set of ovals - a small oval on top of a HUGE oval, added arms, legs eyes, nose, ears, hair, etc. in his deceptively easy style, and when it was done, he said, "See? That's your mother!" I was immensely amazed by this display of skill and told my mum so, showing her the sketch. Being a keen observer of facial expressions, I could gather that her idea of art was considerably different from her husband's.

I don't remember when I started doodling in class, but I do remember getting into a lot of trouble over it. I have been whacked on the head, rapped on the knuckles, and one particular teacher - we used to call him "George Sir" - took pleasure in pinching the underside of the upper arm. If you have been pinched in this area, you would know that it is rather painful and makes you stand up like a bolt of lightning just shot through your chair.

On the bright side, there were some guys who used to like my doodles ( I started calling them 'cartoons', because over time they moved on from the corner of the page to occupying the entire page), and were interested in what form of violence I had inflicted on my subjects this time. Though my childhood was not disturbed at all - it was mostly happy, barring uncomfortable moments like the time when my mum found that her instruction of "when the milkman arrives, take the milk and put it in the large vessel of water (we did not have a refrigerator at the time) on the kitchen platform" followed to the letter, the result being that when my mum returned from our neighbour's place, she found a large vessel of highly diluted milk on the kitchen platform. My arguments on how I was unaware of the fact that milk is NOT supposed to be diluted and how she had not explicitly told me to put the whole packet into the water and not pour the milk, fell on deaf ears. To this day, she continues to tell all my friends about the time "your engineer (heavy sarcasm dripping off this word) friend poured milk into water".

But I digress. The point was that the violence in my cartoons had nothing to do with my childhood being unhappy. It was quite happy. And the cartoons were a bit funny, if you like cartoon noir. So I had a few friends who liked the stuff, and there was one guy - Harsh (not the english "Harsh", but the hindi one - pronounced "Hur(as in Ben Hur)-sh") - who used to give me ideas on new hilarious cartoons we could produce. We had our small group of friends who shared the sense of humour, comic books, and G.I. Joe toys that would have done any geek of the eighties proud.

Sadly, just when I was starting to impress the girl next to me with some "cute" fingerprint cartoons, my father got transferred to Tirunelveli, and that is where I spent the rest - and that means the most - of my adolescent life.

It was only when I got into engineering college about five years later, did I get back to doodling idly on the corner of my fluid mechanics notes. Though I never had quite an admirers' society again, the doodles filled time, and space (I later learned that these are one and the same, and the term to be used is space-time) of which there was a lot lying around in the four years of college. By space, here, I refer to the blank space of my notes, not the personal space available in my room, which was too small to swing a cat in. Not that I swung a cat in there, but a cat is not very different in size from a Nunchaku, and I did swing the latter in the room - once - with slightly distressing results. Other distressing results on swinging the Nunchaku included multiple injuries to my face, hands, and ribs, and the subsequent reduction in the confidence my Sensai had in me, which was not much in the first place. His final comment on the subject of the Nunchaku was, "You do not need an opponent at all."

Anyway, apart from doodling in class, I also tried my hand at 'serious' sketching, but realized that they attracted more laughs than my cartoons had ever did, so I dropped the idea.

Landing in Pune at my first ever job, I realized there was still plenty of scope for my doodling, in the form of department meetings, monthly review meetings, quarterly meetings, annnual meetings, brainstorming sessions, etc. So when I was not playing hangman with Shahina, I was amusing Swati or Mini into giggles with (they did not know it at the time) my "serious" artwork.

After I realized that Peanuts actually made a lot of sense - I had read the strips as a kid and had found them vaguely depressing, I think it was because almost all dialogues were followed by those three dots (...) which leave a sentence hanging in the air - I believe the technical term is 'ellipsis', and upon being introduced to Gary Larson, I once again decided to try my hand at cartooning, and the result is displayed here.

The background to this is the following: each year, all of us employees had to go through this rather painful process of "performance appraisal", also known as "What the heck were you doing the last 2,318 hours in this company?". A large percentage of our rating depended on how we displayed that we have indeed inculcated the company's core values - one of which was "Simplicity". Now please look at the image below.

Now please laugh. The only chap who has, to this date (I sketched this one on a summer night about two years ago) laughed because he actually got the joke was Kakkar, and he is considered quite weird by some of his close friends, including yours truly. Which is pretty much what he thinks of me, so it was rather disturbing when no-one got the joke here. I thus refrained from creating any more cartoons, which was a bit of a wrench, especially as I had thought of one involving a medical student pondering over a semicolon...

The rejected editorial

2005-03-01T21:44:00.000-08:00

I have a belief that if I do not post something or the other on a slightly regular basis here, this blog will meet the same fate of my last one. Thus, I'm indulging in a slight bit of cheating by posting pre-written material like this when I'm too busy/ lazy/ both.

My old company made the mistake of including me in the editorial board for its first-ever newsletter. Ignoring my protests, the rest of the ed board thrust the boring work of writing the editorial on poor me. I did my best, and turned up the piece that follows, but it was rejected outright... after wiping the tears from their eyes, they made me sit and write a tame, watered-down, run-of-the-mill editorial. My exhortations of "please publish this - you can even call it the rejected editorial!" fell on deaf ears.

Hehah. Thus I publish my own stuff.

Editorial

This editorial is supposed to tell you about why we are having a newsletter, and how having this newsletter is going to help us, and how this newsletter is going to grow over the years. To the first, our initial answer was “well, because everybody else seems to be doing it.” Apparently, that was not a good enough reason. So we followed the advice of an old Guru: “When in doubt, Google it.”

You’d be surprised at what we found. Apparently, the newsletter had been accepted as a conventional form of correspondence between officials or friends in Roman times, and in the late Middle Ages newsletters between the important trading families began to cross frontiers regularly. Also, there seemed to be a belief among those who indulged in the occult that people who worked on newsletters lived longer, became rich, and enjoyed exceptional popularity among members of the opposite sex.

No, seriously, now that TACO Engineering has branched off into TFDC, too, a newsletter is a pretty good idea to stay in touch with the who’s who, what’s what, and when’s when in the general Engineering family. And with our company growing at a healthy rate, this would be the next logical step in communication.

Also, Shahina threatened to fire us if we did not do it.

We were just kidding (honestly, Shahina? Fire us?). Well, actually, the purpose of the newsletter would be best explained if you take some time to go through the next few pages. We promise not all of it is boring. Honestly.

-The ed board.

Grunt, grunt...

2005-02-18T08:59:00.000-08:00

Peals of laughter pierced my ears, and I held my phone away, looking at it in disbelief. I have my heart broken, my body drenched, and when I called Lavi to buoy my spirit, and narrated the episodes of the day, the aforementioned was what I heard from her end.

Fine, so my heart wasn't broken, but it was definitely dented. And the episode occurred about ten months ago, but those peals of laughter still sting as if fresh. It is rather painful when you narrate a tragedy in the first person to a friend, hoping the latter would point out the silver lining and all, and the old friend finds the episode funny. Distressing, to say the least. Not what one wants to hear when, having stepped out for a walk to clear the depressed mind, one gets drenched in a surprise shower, accompanied by winds that have the sense of humour to un-roof the tea-shack where one has sought shelter and some tea.

But I present the facts in a slightly haphazard manner. So I shall start at the beginning.

Before I joined the startup I'm working in right now, which, incidentally, is all-male (shucks), I used to work in a larger organization, which, though not exactly populated by members of the daintier sex, definitely had token amounts of the same. And among these was one lady - we shall, to maintain a pretense of gentlemanliness, call her Ms.P - who was, shall we say, rather fetching. Now, unfortunately, I am not one of those dashing young men who, at time=t, are observed approaching the woman they deem as the next conquest, and at time=t+3 minutes, are observed riding into the sunset with the lady perched on their horse/motorcycle/car/scooterette. Nope. Though I am not exactly the bumbling idiot when confronted by a lady, I do tend to bumble a bit when the lady happens to be someone who has a direct effect on my pulse rate. At any rate, I wasn't one you put your money on in the matter of accosting women.

Thus, I remained largely quiet apart from the occasional witticism over the lunch table, till one day, an expansive mood, plus a conversation with a colleague, tipped me over. The conversation ran as follows:

Colleague: Hey, Senti, check out this interesting forward! (turns her screen towards me, revealing mail detailing sun signs and what they say about your personality, your love life, and how you're going to trip over the steps on the way out after work)

Me: (Preserving an air of superiority) Don't tell me you believe in this muck. I'm sure another female has sent this to you. (Scanning document) Oh, yes - Ms.P! (Scanning the recipient list) Hmmm... all female recipients, I notice. So how is it that the Gemini twins always send forwards to only females?
(Note: Ms.P was seldom seen in the absence of another lady of a similar face and build, Ms.Q, though the latter looked rather forbidding. By the Gemini twins I alluded to this pair)

Colleague: (Raises eyebrow) How do you know they're Gemini?

Me: Argh, I was speaking figuratively, HR woman! (ducking under marker pen skilfully thrown by colleague) However, the question shall be immediately clarified.

And thus, without much further thought, I opened my mailbox, clicked on "compose", added the ladies' addresses to the recipient list, and, with brain firing on all eight cylinders, typed in the amazingly tactful question: " A random thought: are you both Gemini?", and clicked "send". Too late I realized that this was perhaps not the best tactic to strike up conversation.

Well, Ms.Q did not take very kindly to the probing by some chap she hardly knew the name of, and I got a rather strong-worded mail expressing her disapproval. However, Ms.P was kind enough to let me know that no, she was Aquarius, and what was my sun sign? Hastily thanking my stars that the underlying snide remark in the question went unnoticed by both parties, I applied myself to the task, and went on to ask the brilliant question all guys should ask the girls they are interested in when they want to avoid beating around the bush: "Do you like reading? My favourite happens to be Michael Crichton. Have you read any of his books?". Genius, I thought to myself about two minutes after sending the mail, head resting on both hands. If Natural Selection had its way, I would never procreate.

However, she was surprisingly tolerant, and remarked that though she had not had the opportunity to read any of Mr.Crichton's works, she was eager to start, and could I lend her any?

Patting myself on the back, I went back home and scanned my bookshelf, the only piece of furniture I have apart from my TV stand. I soon realized that I had been rather lax in claiming back the various Crichtons that I had lent friends, and was thus short of the best ones - Jurassic Park, Sphere, Prey, Disclosure, etc. Upon close scrutiny of the collection, I decided on Congo. It would have to do for now.

Early next morning, I hand over the book to the lady, who was looking as dazzling as ever. She smiled and walked away, and while I was still recovering my breath, I get a mail from her thanking me, and wasn't this the book that inspired the monster flick "King Congo"?

I reeled under the sudden blow. Ohmygod, please let this be a joke, I prayed fervently, as I replied politely, stating the facts: No, this did inspire a motion pic, but it was not "King Congo", but a slightly more intelligent flick called "Congo", after the book. I also mentioned that perhaps the movie she was referring to, which also had a Gorilla in it, was "King Kong". I then sat back, and hoped fervently for a mail bearing something similar to "Ha ha ha!" in the subject line.

Then the final crushing blow: it was no joke. The woman had genuinely mixed up the names. The name of a Michael Crichton novel mixed up with a SENSELESS B-GRADE MOVIE ABOUT AN OVERGROWN, HORNY GORILLA!

The next time I come across a woman who accelerates the pulse, etc, I think I shall go up to her, grunt, flare my nostrils, and twitch my ears. The results would not be very different, but shocks as described above can be avoided.

Incidentally, did Congo have a king at some point? Will check google...

Escapism

2005-02-11T14:18:00.000-08:00

Another sleepless night. I envy those people who have an extraordinary drive to work, and sit working through nights, while I stay awake in bed, staring numbly at the TV, watching the late-night show of Terminator 2: Judgement day for the nth time, hardly registering it.

I have seen people who are so absorbed in their work, that even remarks like, "Hey, remember that book of yours that you thought you lost, and were upset enough about it to get drunk that night? Well, I found it!" end up falling on deaf ears. I have seen these chaps sit hunched over their computers, ignoring people around them, ignoring their own hunger ( "Ah, finally solved the problem. Wow, am I hungry! What's the time? Two? Damn, I missed lunch and dinner. Hey, why are my trousers wet? What's that smell?" ) and other bio-functions. I have even, on one occasion, seen a guy sit and work, unflinching, through a Backstreet Boys song.

Such people scare the hell out of me. They give me guilt complexes. They make me feel I am inefficient, lacking in concentration, and am a burden on the company I work for. I usually like to keep up an active chatter while working, and I think the habit became a little compulsive - I have been caught talking to my computer, and occasionally have been censured for "loud, offkey singing at work". The singing, apparently, has stopped ever since I joined the company I work for now. I guess it is difficult to sing "You are my sunshine" when the speakers are blaring, "Fortune, fame, mirror vain, gone insane," etc.

If you were to meet my english teacher back from school, she would say, "Senthil? Laziness. That has always been his problem. It's going to do him in, one day." And sometimes, when I lie awake in bed, staring at the ceiling (the cable TV network conks off from time to time) and thinking about why my life is the way it is today, I eventually zero down on the above remark. Now, to be honest with you, though I would not call myself lazy - that's too strong a word, I have noticed that I do have a substantial amount of inertia. I always needed superhuman effort to start a project. I believe the technical term is "getting down to it". That has always been my problem. When I was a kid, I remember sitting at the study table, staring at the homework, flicking my fountain-pen between my fingers, concentrating on a dog-ear on a page of the textbook, with one feeble part of my brain whispering insistently, "you will have to eventually get down to it, you know," while the stronger parts of the grey stuff were dwelling upon the latest episode of Johnny Sokko and the Flying Robot , till a sharp cry from my mother brought my astral projection slamming back into my body. Upon looking around for the source of her apprehension, I found the ink from my pen liberally sprayed over my homework, the table, my shirt, my face, and the facing wall, the droplets lying roughly in the plane of the flick. I had given an inadvertent demonstration of centrifugal force. The scene gave me a bit of a jolt, though I admit that my next reaction was to shift my point of concentration from the dog-ear on the page to the drops of ink splashed in almost a straight line over the book and the table. I thought it looked beautiful in a way, though my mother disagreed strongly.

That was another of my problems - concentration. I lacked the "mental anchor", to use another technical term. I was always drifting off, and found myself in the most awkward positions when the volume was suddenly turned up and I realized that either my mother or one of my teachers had been mouthing a question in my direction. In fact, even as I type, I realize that I have drifted off and have ended up projecting a contradictory image of the self. On the one hand, I am scared of people being absorbed in their work to the point of being impervious to external stimuli. On the other hand, I admit I have a problem drifting off. However, the astute reader may comprehend that there is a fine shade of difference between the two. While I do admit to being a little distracted in my childhood, it was not at a time when I was working, or, more suitable to that period, studying. In fact, when I was actually studying, I was so in tune with my surroundings that I could hear a fly alight on some butter in the kitchen. No, the drifting off of mental faculties happened when I was trying to start studying.

So you can imagine my apprehension when I was having a beer with a friend of mine (who, incidentally, is one of the work-maketh-me-forget guys), and a friend of this chap joined us, and after the pleasantries had been exchanged, proceeded to ask us, "Do you sometimes feel like not working?" Apparently he had been trying to work, but today was unlike any other day - he did not feel like working!

My friend admitted that yes, there have been occasions when he, too has felt the same.

They then turned to me.

I don't remember what I said. I had drifted off.

Mediocrity

2005-02-08T04:44:00.000-08:00

Again, something that has plagued me through life. It has been my curse to be just above average in everything, and I mean everything. From academics to extra-curriculars to probably even wooing women (though the latter was not officially substantiated), I have been just above average. In my successes in the women-wooing department, again, I think I have been just above average, if you consider the sample space of engineers in the same social setting as yours truly.

Anyway, I was reminded of this because I took a "How nerdy are you" test, and the result:

Thus, I think I'll truncate this ramble short, it's going to be one of my average entries on this page anyway.

...of kerosene and digital thermometers

2005-02-04T03:00:00.000-08:00

The last two weeks have been rather...trying, for lack of a better word. First someone pulled the carpet out from under me and my bike, causing various injuries to man and machine, and then I landed up with some sort of "bronchal infection". I use this term because people freak out when I tell them, "I have a lung infection." The power of language.

The infection, though, put me in one particular spot where I became acutely aware of how confused people really are, and how often they say stuff they haven't a clue about, or are unable to express themselves when a lucid thought forms inside their crania.

Last Saturday, I had gone to work, believing that my troubles were over now that the doc had diagnosed what was wrong with me, and that I only had to follow the prescription and take regular meals and medicine to get better. Unfortunately, the human body turned out to be rather unpredictable.

Feeling feverish all of a sudden, I decided to call it a day. Now, have you ever had a fever where you could actually feel the temperature rising? Rather scary. This was what was happening while I was riding my bike home, so I decided to stop at the local chemist's and pick up a thermometer. One of those digital ones. I'm always a little apprehensive about the analog ones, since I've had nightmares about biting down hard and swallowing mercury and shards of glass. I also am a little impatient when a thermometer is stuck in my mouth, and tend to pull out the thing before the temperature stabilizes. I believe this is also related to the thermometer-biting fear, though it could be just discomfort. Especially when those nurses jab the instrument deep and hard under the tongue, and prevent you from dislodging it into a more comfortable position, and make you sit there till your eyes start to tear.

So, it was a digital thermometer for me. The ones that go "beep-beep" when the reading stabilizes. Thus I walked into this chemist's shop and asked the lady, "Do you have a digital thermometer?"

"Which type?"

This threw me for a second. I wasn't aware that they were selling various types of digital thermometers. But I guess if they could have watches telling you your blood pressure, pulse rate, blood sugar, leucocyte count, melanin distribution of the skin directly under the dial and what not, then it would hardly be surprising that there are several types of digital thermometers. Preserving an air of sang-froid, I inquired, "How many types do you have?"

"There is the type with mercury in it, and there is a digital one."

Realizing that any display of annoyance would be lost on the silly, inattentive lady, who was probably the wife of the chemist, the latter having perhaps taken off to attend to more important matters, I merely gritted my teeth and asked for the digital one.

With the grace and speed of a ballet dancer, the lady reached under the counter and picked out the instrument. After futile attempts to pull it out of the packaging, she gave up the task to me and my fevered, trembling hands as she attended to a couple who had just walked in.

"We need three of this and two of that", the male half of the couple said, indicating the prescription he handed over to Mrs.Chemist.

"These are antibiotics. I can only give you the exact prescribed number. Did the doctor ask you to get these?"

"No, that was the old doctor, but tomorrow we will take him to a new doctor, but now we need these. Three of this and two of that."

It was probably my fever, but I thought something was missing in the reasoning supplied. Ours is not to question why, I muttered under my breath and tapped on the counter to indicate that I was indeed ready to make my purchase. The lady ambled over.

"Oh, yes." Pause. "Hmmm... I don't know the price of this model... I'll just call and find out."
By this time, my fever seemed to be in the red zone, and I was, understandably, at the end of my tether. "Can you please hurry?" I hissed, clutching the counter for support.

"DO YOU HAVE KEROSENE?" a voice roared from a point above and behind me. All eyes in the shop turned to the owner of the roar - a huge, middle-aged chap who looked like he had walked into medical stores and walked out with kerosene all the time.

"....kerosene?" Mrs.Chemist repeated in a small voice.

"NO, NO, Ka-ROSIN!"

"Ohhh.... Crocin!"

"YES, YES. SYRUP. FAAR MY FIVE-YEAR-OLD SON!"

I was by now rather far gone. I mumbled a protest to the lady, an act I would have considered suicidal under normal circumstances. Decapitation would be an easier death as compared to cooking at the counter.

"Er....the price?" I mumbled.

Eventually, handing the chap the bottle, the lady turned to the phone. After exchanging pleasantries, she got to the meat of the matter.

"So what is the price of this digital thermometer?" Pause. "The company is...." she flipped over the package, "...digital...thermometer."

"THIS IS FOR CHILDRAAN FRAAM ONE TO FOUR YEARS! MY BOY IS FAAIVE YEARS OLD!"

I winced. Amazing, the way nature allows such creatures to reproduce. The lady, however, was more tolerant.

"See, this is generally meant for children. It would be a mild dose for your child."

She got back to the phone while the huge guy pondered this, staring at the bottle.

"No, that is the company. Digital thermometer. There is nothing else on the cover."

"IT DOES NAAT HAVE PARACETAMOL!"

I had a feeling that she was beginning to lose it, too, with this guy. But she preserved an outward calm. Probably one of the things that are taught in the phamracy courses. "No, see? There you are. Under 'contents'. Paracetamol, see?"

My knees had started to buckle. What a way to die, I thought. Survive a crash on the bike at 80 kmph, and then die at the counter of a chemist, delayed by inane conversation. Not unlike that chap Humayun who fought endless battles and then broke his neck when he slipped on his library steps. I remembered reading about it at school and the first thought that occurred was that it was an awful way to be remembered.

"....and sixty rupees."

The mist cleared. I found the lady was trying to tell me something.

"Sorry?"

"Two hundred and sixty rupees."

Highway robbery, but I hardly had a choice. Paid up the amount, staggered out.

The next thing I remember was reading a hundred and three on my thermometer. Survived to tell the tale, though. Evidently.

Retribution?

2005-01-24T12:03:00.000-08:00

"Chaar hazaar teen sau ho gaye, saab", the mechanic looked up from his calculations. He must've seen the expression on my face, because he immediately followed it up with yet another discourse on how I was lucky to be alive, that I should ride my bike more carefully, not ride on the highway, especially at night, and a thousand other things that I'd heard from people throughout the week.

I paid up, cursed the rusty nail that had decided to get itself introduced to my bike's front tyre when I was speeding along the highway, and slowly got on my bike, taking care not to touch my knee to anything.Finally, after a week of being forced to stay in complete isolation, I was mobile again. I almost welcomed the pain in my knee when I kick-started the bike. Anything but the off-white depression of my apartment walls, the monotony of the TV, or the tedious task of propping my head up on a carefully positioned arm, trying to read The history of nearly everything, falling asleep when the painkiller's side-effect kicks in, bringing the bruises on the carefully arranged arm in contact with the pillow, causing immediate wakefulness and free speech.

My poor bike. Thanks to my school days, I know exactly what the poor thing would be feeling like. Back when I was in school, my bicycle had a perennial flat, and thus I was usually found hitching a ride with Lakshmanan, this friend of mine who used to attract girls by flaring his nostrils and twitching his ears, alternating both movements into some sort of facial dance. Somehow the girls loved it, and though he was probably helped along by his good looks, I always used to lie awake at nights and wonder why I was not gifted in the area of fine facial muscle control.

So this chap used to take me around on his bicycle, and though I always tried to steer conversation away from his cycling skills, he would invariably say, "Hey, check this out - I can exchange the hands holding the handles and still..." at which point the remaining part of his claim would be lost in my cry of surprise, closely followed by a crash. And invariably, when the dust cleared, it was always the hitcher of rides - moi - who was found holding on to various parts of the anatomy, cursing, spitting dust, and looking desperately around for alternate means of transportation. And the rider would not have a scratch on him. Made me think a lot on the unfairness of things.

My point here is that this is precisely what my bike would feel about me. After numerous spills, I have always managed to walk away while my bike has had enough parts replaced to... well, let's say Frankenstein would feel threatened, for lack of a better comparison. I have nothing to complain about, but the other day I was reading yet another Far Side, and one of the cartoons was titled Night of the crash test dummies.

I'm having difficulty sleeping ever since.

Night of the Crash-Test Dummies

2005-01-24T11:24:00.000-08:00

Weird people I know

2004-12-11T15:29:00.000-08:00

Having weird friends is fun, but unsettling at times. I am not complaining here - thanks to these chaps, I always have funny stories to tell people, but just when I feel confident that nothing these guys can do would surprise me anymore, they rattle the confidence.

A few nights ago, we - Kakkar, Shrik, and yours truly - made one of our too-late-in-the-night-to-be-decent visits to a friend's place, and created enough ruckus to wake her poor husband up, who staggered into the living room with an expression that initially reminded me of what Jack - the chap who climbed all those mutant beanstalks - may have seen when the giant lumbered towards him. The expression changed to one of resigned recognition, and after mumbled hellos and a 'happy birthday' thrown at me, he promptly fell asleep where he sat. Probably because Shrik, within five minutes of arrival, had fallen asleep in the most comfortable divan in the room, thus preventing the head of the household from roosting in what may have been his favourite spot.

After conversation had died down to the level of discussing the latest game the couple had loaded on their computer, we decided it was a clear cue for us to exit smiling - we gracefully withdrew, with Shrik - fast asleep and grinning from ear to ear - in tow. Kakkar was not one to let a few drinks go to his head - or so I thought until that night - and pulled his car out, turned on the heater, even played some soothing music for Shrik's benefit - the man was continuing his sleep in the back seat... I could not make out if he was still grinning owing to the subdued lighting - and moved on into the cold night, with the usual dogs chasing us on the street.

In Pune, as with any other place in the country, one can always count on dogs chasing all objects that move in the night. It is more or less the dog's birthright to do so, and they have never been discouraged, except perhaps by irate cyclists wearing heavy boots. The dog chasing us was looking at a small period of excitement in a dull night, chasing a car for about twenty metres or so and then returning to its pack with the air of "the triumphant return". It was in for a bit of a surprise. Kakkar, otherwise a tolerant chap, has never liked dogs barking at him, and has on occasion tried to tell this to our neighbour's dog, not that it listened very carefully . Tonight our man decided enough was enough. and before I realized what was happening, we were going in circles, with the dog firmly fixed in the headlamp beams. Now one can imagine the poor animal's shock when the retreating prey turns back and gives it the run of its life, and if it could talk, it would've probably let out a few surprised exclamations, beginning with "What the-" and ending with a string of profanities.

Now like I said, the transition from the chased to the chaser was so sudden that I had only time to hold on to the B-pillar, exclaim "What the-" and let out a string of profanities. But I am an ordinary chap whose idea of excellent physical shape is being able to walk down two flights of stairs to my bike and back. Shrik, on the other hand, bench-presses pickup trucks and bicycles down the length of the Konkan coast before breakfast. Thus he has always had amazingly low response times to sudden changes in motion/mood/relative humidity and so on. Thus, while I was still trying to realize what the heck was going on, Shrik had got an immediate grasp of the situation, and laughed. I mean, not the hysterical laughs that I heard myself laugh when I went down one of those slippery tubes to hell in one of those amusement parks, but the real thing. The laughter seemed to indicate that he regarded chasing dogs down streets in the middle of the night, scaring them out of their wits, as a fine idea.

Now if I'm conveying the idea that these people are the animal cruelty sponsors, I'm not good at this. No, they are otherwise nice to animals, and some people as well. Kakkar, for example, was careful not to catch up with the dog, though it may have been for the fun of prolonging the race, and once he got bored of the activity, we had an uneventful ride back to my place, barring the few detours to put other errant dogs in their place.

The neighbour's dog still barks at Kakkar. Thankfully the fence is high. Too high for Kakkar.