The next one merited a single run, may be one more,
But deflected by the fielder’s hand, it went for a four.

Then came the last one in the hole, in pace lacking,
But I was too brilliant for that, and sent it packing.

There Rangin, I had hit you for six boundaries in an over,
A fact I will never let you forget, you suck as a bowler.

We needed some money. Kuekuatsheu, Pacino and My Little Friend joined us as we went to the bank. They came prepared with a car, fancy clothes and a few guitars, all ready to leave for Goa. Kuekuatsheu was not entirely sure of the plan, but My Little Friend agreed to talk to him, and she managed to convince him. When My Little Friend talked, people listened.

While the rest of my friends waited, My Little Friend and I went to the teller. The guards all knew My Little Friend, so we got to skip the queue. The woman on the counter was not very cooperative, however, but My Little Friend managed to have a word with her, and she agreed to hurry up. When My Little Friend talked, people listened.

Just when the woman was handing over the money, cops arrived and asked us to surrender. The rest of my friends started panicking. I looked at My Little Friend and she looked back at me, and we both knew that she had to start talking again. When My Little Friend talked, people listened.

My Little Friend never wasted a word. By the time she was done talking, four of the cops were silent, and the rest had surrendered. We handcuffed them before locking up everyone and then left by the fire-escape. We changed out of our fancy clothes, walked across the street to our nondescript car parked in front of a public park, and stuffed the money into guitars.

Just as we were leaving for Goa, I realised that I was yet to introduce My Little Friend to the rest of my friends. As I turned from the driving seat, I said, “Say Hello to My Little Friend.”

When My Little Friend talked, people listened.

Eliminating the sporadic ones, I see that all the posts fall into two bunches marking my most prolific phases. The first two seasons.

This post marks the beginning of the third.

There are two kinds of novice writers of prose. Those who start out as narcissists and those who are too aware of their narcissism, and smart enough to keep it out of their prose.

These smart folk never make it as writers. They wouldn’t be able to make it as writers even if they meant to. Prose can never have a life of its own, so the writer must put some of his own into it. Those who are too conscious and afraid of the judgment of others (audience?) shy away from it and their work is little more than dry wit and may be a few insights. Anything more than a few pages long will tire the reader out.

Ah, but then, isn’t it the job of the writer to be aware of how his work will be judged and evaluated and manipulate it? Yes. Awareness makes some people empowered and some others handicapped.

Then is it the other lot, the ones running wild and free with their self-indulgence, who make it as writers?

Well, some of them do. The ones who grow out of their own perspective. The ones who know how to see. The ones who know how other people see.

That’s the catch, isn’t it? Seeing is not enough. Seeing what other people can’t is not good enough either. Of all the things you see, you have to know which part is visible to everyone else and which part is not. This knowledge has not much to do with your ability to see. Growing out of your narcissism is the first criteria.

After that, this knowledge can come from anywhere. May be you are very smart. May be your empathy gives you the insight. Years of cultivated habit? Or pure force of reason (I like this one, because I can’t imagine how it could possibly work :)). May be, more often than not, it just comes to you and you don’t know how to account for it.

Oh, and if you keep writing for a long enough stretch of time, even if your writing doesn’t improve by as much as your overestimation, at least your narcissism loses its sting.

Then there are the poets.

Narcissism is an absolute most, I imagine. But as I speculated, if you can’t differentiate between what you see and what others see, you’ll be just wasting my time telling me the things I already know and can see.

That is what has prompted this spur-of-the-moment half-baked post. In the Sunday supplement of the local daily, I usually go through the humour column (I find its absurd exaggeration surprisingly sophisticate). But today I read a few poems (yes, I read Sunday supplements on Mondays) and I feel sick.

I feel sick of poetry and poems. I know this feeling will pass, but it’s exasperating while it’s there. Bad poetry is one thing, but pathetically repetitive lack of imagination can incite existential despair. Why am I reading this? What the fuck am I doing here right now reading this? Why the bloody fuck has my life come down to reading this? Why am I even alive? Fuck, I feel sick of poetry.

Dear reader, if you have persisted so far, you might as well go on and read Neruda’s “Walking Around,” which seems to sum up myself for the moment, even if in part. Yes, right now, I am sick of being myself (as opposed to being sick of myself, which is also a condition I sometimes attain).

Oh, I’ll just go on and smile.

:D

the books I was gifted in my last birthday (all of which were subsequently read, and hence the post!),

Victor’s attempt to dissuade me from my attempts at explaining my email id to a shopgirl who had wondered about it aloud,

reviews of Billu Barber and Chandni Chauk to China,

the cool ruby script I wrote to make gchat-like conversations from all the smses in my phone,

the bug I discovered in ubuntu-gnome with multiple mice (mouses sounds better, and the bug is probably a feature anyway! :))

- the list goes on.

All that will await the completion of my ongoing exams, however, and here are a couple of pictures from Holi this year.

This one is actually a song, to be sung along the tunes of “I am a vampire” by Antsy Pants (Juno fans will remember this). Please note that it wasn’t supposed to be funny. And I am not saying it wasn’t supposed to be funny in order to cover up my theoretical and highly debatable crude sense of humour by an acute awareness of it.

I am a girl-stalker, I am a girl-stalker (2x)
I am a girl-stalker
Girl-stalker
I am a girl-stalker
I have lost my thing

So I’m sad
And I feel horny
So I cry
And I’m very angry
And I hate some girl lately
So I’m so no more sad
And ache yeah, yeah

I am a girl-stalker
And I am
Looking in the city
Pretty girls
Don’t look at me
Don’t look at me
Cause
I don’t have my thing
But I have lost
My thing

I am a girl-stalker
I am a girl-stalker
I have lost
My thing again
I am a girl-stalker
I am a girl-stalker
I have lost
My thing again

So I get bone
And I shred
So I fuck all
And I croon some place
And I sing
With my best looking
And I want
To play the guitar
But my guitar
Is out of tune
I am a girl-stalker
I am looking in the CD
And the musical
Don’t play with me
Don’t play with me

Because I don’t play
With my thing again
And I have lost
My mind again

In the pocket of the shirt I changed into after taking a bath, I found a small note from my kid brother. On one side, it said, “Beauty is not how you look. It is not how beautiful you are. Beauty is not the figure. Beauty is the inner self.”

A small arrow mark at the bottom asked to to turn the piece of paper. On the other side, it said, “So change your underwear daily.”

It’s good to be at home. :)

I have not written for a couple of months here. The reader might be tempted to believe that I had stopped blogging because I got a life, and he would probably be right. The hostel I had mentioned got completed and I shifted. Unfortunately, the router there doesn’t work yet (BSNL refuses to provide one without earthing, and the contractor keeps claiming the earthing works!), and it’ll be another month or two before there is any internet connectivity there. For the sake of the record,

There is no phone connectivity either.

A guy lent us his camera to Prince on the condition that we edit his engagement videos (still inside the camera). So Prince turned a producer and together with Rainbow, he rounded up some guys and a few girls and shot a cute little movie. I had been entrusted with the task of editing both the engagement and the movie footage, but the engagement was called off and subsequently we didn’t have to do anything about it.

The movie we shot is going to be called “It’s all in our hands.”

The shooting sessions were fun. Nobody laughed at my Terminator jokes, but it was ok. I did lend a helping hand to Rainbow in some of the more difficult shots, but I spent most of the time sitting in Prince’s room eating snacks and listening to the assembled crowd discuss relationships. Most of the talk centered around the difference in the way boys and girls perceive relationships. It was amusing to listen to a bunch of girls talking about what they could possibly want from a guy.

The next I handcuffed Loki and Ray together with the rented handcuffs. A few laughs and a few fights later, the shooting was over.

Oh, and I have a paper tomorrow. :)

I am going to say such nice things about him that it might look like I am being blackmailed into this testimonial, but nothing could be farther than the truth. ;)

He is my oldest friend, and if you discount the mickey mouse he received on his eighth birthday, I’m his oldest friend too. Seriously, he is one of the greatest guys you’ll ever meet, and I am not kidding, and for the last time, I’m not being blackmailed into saying this.

He is handsome for one thing, really really handsome, as some of you might already have noticed, and he is necessarily equipped to back up his handsomeness. There, I said it, and you can take my word for it.

He is warm-hearted, but far from being hot blooded. Sensible, mature, intelligent, with a funny bone that is not immediately apparent, great social manners, what more could you ask from a guy?! No, I am not being blackmailed into selling him to girls either. No, seriously, I mean all of what I have said.

I’ll join his Orkut Fan List sometime soon, I swear. :)

——————————–

The Second One
——————————–

It is tragic the way I have been in love with him behind his back all these years. Half the time that I spend talking to him, I think of kissing him – and he doesn’t have a clue. I am sure he isn’t going to believe this testimonial either. If only Orkut allowed us to write the testimonials in
blood… but alas! It is not to be so. Fate has other cruel plans.

I know this is the part where I praise him. But I think those trivialities are better left unexplained. I am not going to thank him for being the beautiful person that he is, though I could, and perhaps I should, but I never would, for I fell in love with him face flat first. Rephrasing an overused cliche, I could almost say that I love him, therefore I exist.

And yes, it was for you that I wrote, “it takes all my courage not to treat you with the passion I have for you.” The prank was only an excuse for letting the thought out of my chest.

It wasn’t only Yeats who wished for the clothes of heaven. Tread softly, because you tread on my heart.

If presented with the opportunity to do such a thing again today, I would like to make only one change. I would list some of the aphorisms I mentioned, like, Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative, Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative, Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow, Ambition is the last refuge of the failure, etc etc. This reminds me of Salver (or was it Salvor?!) Hardin from Asimov’s first foundation book, who was famous in later foundation books (particularly the second and the third) for his aphorisms. I think it was Hober Mallow who quotes him thus – Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent!

Rainbow was certainly not incompetent. After elaborate explanations of why my action was equivalent to stabbing him in his back, not that he minded it too much, I have done that a lot to him, and I can tell you that he usually enjoys it, because sometimes it ends up with breakfasts with really pretty girls (not on his bed though, and I know he is going to murder me for this comment if he ever read this blog, because sometimes those girls go on to be serious girlfriends of close friends!), but as I was saying, I agreed that the least I could do was to delete all my scraps. Going by my previous habits, I deleted all my scraps and all her scraps and then apologised for that and promptly disappeared. :)

Today’s item is a letter to Rainbow which was never sent. Talks about books, music, movies and mathematics have been censored (removed, mostly) lest it should give a hint towards the time and place and context of this letter. Everything deemed to be personal has been removed too. And then there was the shameless self obsession of a typical teenager which I found embarrassing after all these year (thank god for that, I have done some growing up, though I don’t claim to have grown out of my self obsession! :)).

The Letter

Dear Rainbow,

This is from a man abjectly hopeless in his effete existence. Take it for what you will.

I am just kidding.

But you shouldn’t have forced me to write. You made me remind myself of the proverbial fool who doesn’t have something to say but only has to say something.

**** blah blah blah – life, universe and everything else ****

Not knowing what we have to do in this life and this world might be a trifle depressing to get on with, but one can learn to live with that, everyone does. But try living without the slightest idea about what you usually do! That more or less sums up my life since I came back. You’ll remember I had to call you to ask where I lived after arriving here. Things have not improved since then. It’s as if I forgot my entire life in the month I was away. Today I had to sit down and look at all the scattered coupons and brochures to remember what I usually ate for lunch!

**** blah blah blah – mathematics ****

My submission to this tedium and loneliness in this unfashionable, unimaginative and unromantic manner is so torturingly slow that I wish I had been a pervert. So that I could entertain myself! Perversion in other people, no matter how original and refreshing, is disgusting. I think perversion is entertaining only when you are in charge.

**** blah blah blah – blah blah blah ****

To continue with the old theme, what is mathematics without sets, and what is art without curves? And what good is a woman without a set of curves for that matter, one is tempted to ask.

**** blah blah blah – common friends ****

… but I can’t help adding a thing or two about girls, love and other demons. If G doesn’t throw in the rope in about an year or so, I guess it’ll be time for you to move on or try harder, whatever you decide. I don’t care. You are stupid and I don’t care.

I would be amused if you turned out to be exactly how I have known you. If all I know about you is all that there is to be known.

I am not saying the Rainbow I know is inadequate. There are so many details about and around you and I can’t see you through them. Too many details that might seem adequate. It is not details, but dimensions of you that I assume. I write assuredly because I know you are not the man I have known.

I have always believed that it takes a woman to know a man, and more often than not, a man to not know a woman.

What I’m trying to say is – you need a woman in your life. Do not pine the years away after your own Estella.

I’ll quote something to you from Vikram Seth.

Time siddles by : on television
The soaps dissolve, the jingles change.
Defeat or pity or derision
Constricts our heart. Our looks grow strange
Even to us. The grail, perfection,
Dims, and we come to view rejection
As an endurable result
Of hope and trial, and exult
When search or risk or effort chances
To grant us someone who will do
For love, and who may love us too -
While those who wait, as age advances,
Aloof for Ms. or Mr. Right
Weep to themselves in the still night.

**** blah blah blah – unspeakable things! :) ****

There is only one thing infinitely more pathetic than to have lost the woman you love, and that is to have won her and realised that you are gay!

**** blah blah blah – unmentionable things! :) :) ****

Before I came back, I spent a night in Vic’s house. Vic, Ced, the Bitter friend and I. We talked about the old days and realised how much we have changed. My hilarious encounters with mathematics teachers. Ced’s minor flirtations with college politics. Sophika Naaz (I never saw her, by the way. I don’t even know how to spell her name. I don’t even know if that is her name!). The Vic-Herm-Ced angle and then my stories. It was hard to believe we were talking about ourselves.

A lot of secrets were spilled (confirmed, more accurately). No surprises though. I, as always, had no secrets. The only question I was asked was to name the girls I had crushes on after I left, and I offered to list out all the girls I ever had crushes on. I was merely being sadistic. It was just like high school, when I would walk up to unsuspecting victims and offer to cut their throats with a plastic scale.

They begged me to stop by the time I reached class 7. Then we went on to bitch about you.

**** blah blah blah – other stuff, the end! ****

Putting Ghajini into a genre

Ghajini is not Memento. Ghajini is the boy-meets-girl (and falls in love) story followed by boy-avenges-girl’s death rant. The non-linear unfolding of the narrative is superfluous because there is no surprise in the story and because it doesn’t serve any purpose except for tightening the pace. It’s a different movie altogether, with a different focus and a different niche, and it is entirely unnecessary to keep Memento in mind when thinking of it.

Ghajini is not Bollywood either. It has been reworked to Mumbai, but the screenplay wouldn’t have made much sense without its Southie (I think it’s called Kollywood!) motifs. For example, Asin plays the typical innocent bubbly girl with attractive simplicity (real life bimbo made larger than life on screen!). Obviously this is a character done to death in Bollywood, but they do it with a different kind of sensibility in South which you can see in this movie. The Goody Two-Shoes-ness of Asin might thus be a little jarring to the rest of India, but I am sure they will enjoy the bit where Aamir Khan subconsciously learns to drink tea in a pedestrian manner from her.

Ghajini is Kollywood in Bollywood clothes with the addition of Aamir Khan. It’s almost a scene by scene remake of the original except for a better paced and politically correct (or may be I should say cinematically correct!) ending.

Digression to South

There is a remake of Bommarillu (Genelia plays another Miss Goody Two-Shoes Bimbo) in pipeline, and I’ll quit writing on this blog if the hero doesn’t pick up some pedestrian mannerisms from her in the course of the movie. The original in fact contains this very pedestrian way of drinking tea as depicted in Ghajini.

I am being a little harsh. This transference of pedestrian habits symbolises the hero loosening his tie and all that sort of thing, I know. My problem is, I want somebody to invent a different narrative technique to convey hair being let loose. I am tired of the same old shit being peddled around with upbeat music and sweeping camera movements. Audrey Hepburn blowing her nose into Peck’s handkerchief was funny fifty years back in Roman Holiday, but I am sorry if I don’t enjoy seeing it now after so many rehashes of it in just about every other average chick flick.

I want to see some imagination. Something inventive like Saawariya or Amelie. Content can wait. I want to see something inventive or just pretty.

Now back to Ghajini!

Ghajini is a formula movie in two parts. The formula is simple, but broken into non-linear (in time) pieces to interweave the two parts (which differ greatly in mood) in order to make the transition smooth. In fact, because the transitional difficulties have been dealt with by screenplay, it has allowed the director to exaggerate and contrast the moods of those two parts.

Romance and Revenge.

In the part of Romance, the boy falls in love with a girl who is faking to be his girl friend. It has been done with nice low key humour and perfectly romantic ambience. Something you can take your girl friend to!

And then the girl dies and in the Revenge part he goes on around trying to avenge her murder. The original stylised looks of action sequences have been retained. I have been thinking how they were done, and my guess is that they shot them with the usual jumpiness and jarrings and then smoothed the image progressions.

The Music

While the music is disappointing, the background score is actually good (particularly in emotional/ contemplative scenes). Guzarish had a great potential, but the music director seems to have run out of material and instead of sitting on the simple piano bar (which is what this song really is. it’s a very pretty piano bar stretched to fit some average piece of lyrics.) till it grew to be a decent song, he has attempted to make a song out of it! It reminds of his last movie, “Yuvraaj,” about which I have written elsewhere.

But I don’t blame him for making such a mess out of Tu Hi Meri Dost Hai (of Yuvraaj). Gulzar is solely responsible for that, because I can see that the original music Rehman must have had in his mind was twisted and contorted to fit Gulzar’s crappy pretentious lyrics. That movie is full of some of the worst lyrics ever written.

Moving on, Kaise Mujhe Tum Mil Gayi is a well crafted and well placed song. The high notes of the song might have been unsuitable to the occasion, but Aamir Khan’s portrayal of the emotion is striking and the song and the visuals together capture the mood very well and mark one of the high points of the movie. In fact, without the song and without Aamir Khan, I think the sequence would have been overtaken by its clichéd overdose of mush.

Aamir Khan and Asin

Needless to say, the movie rests on the shoulders of Aamir Khan, and he has some shoulders! I can’t stop gushing about his looks in the movie. For one thing, he has eight packs. But what I like best is the fact that he looks so cute in the songs in spite of all the beef. He looks incredibly cute in the songs, and I can’t help thinking how handsome he is.

And of course he has acted very well. In the romance part, he plays it with a lot of sensitivity which makes it plausible and convincing. But he plays the revenge part with subtle exaggeration which will capture the attention of every action buff. He plays the revenge part with murderous and blind rage. Blind rage overshadows the hatred that is supposed to drive him.

Which is how it should have been, now that I think about it. There is nothing that he can pin his hatred and frustration on. Without memory, there is no focus to his hatred. So it manifests itself as uncontrollable rage as he goes on around avenging the murder of the love his life. And I love the way Aamir Khan does it. It looks spectacular.

Asin turns out to be a decorative piece and bubbles and simpers (yes, she simpers. she tries to giggle but ends up simpering.) on the screen competently but with mediocrity. She doesn’t have a good figure (as yet?!) and is probably a little too fat for Bollywood! She doesn’t have hangups though, and may be she can act.

I must digress here to mention Rani Mukherjee’s character in Chori Chori. It was not a particularly remarkable movie, and I think it didn’t even get a theatrical release because of delays, but it features what I like to call a piece of vintage Rani Mukherjee! She plays an orphan who pretends to be the fiancée of a man in love with another woman and plays her part with incredible nonchalance and helplessness and sweetness. I love her in that movie.

Unique Selling Points

It’s a short movie, well paced and well acted.
Decent depiction of romance and action sequences. Southie style, but still decent.
Aamir Khan.

That makes it three stars out of five!

The Godfather (An obvious digression!)

Before the sun sets on a lonely Aamir Khan on a lonely bench, we see that he sees Asin next to him as he unwraps the gift. This scene has a point. It is expected to magnify and drive home his poignancy and his sense of loss by depicting what life could have been without the bitter unnecessary tragedies. They usually end movies about such dramatic loss with scenes with brief and imaginary happy union, but here it was more useful because it was necessary to show that in spite of his loss of memory, he is acutely aware of what he has lost in life.

It reminded me of the last scene of God Father 3. Every God Father movie ended with a brief scene which somehow managed to capture the essence of what was going on, but it was only after the last scene of God Father 3 was over that I understood and felt the bitterness of Michael’s loss of every woman that he had ever loved. That loss was what had underlined his entire life. Ignoring the thriller plots, the first movie is about his transition, the second about confirmation and the third one about resignation. The point is, the resignation doesn’t come till the very end. He had been working towards that resignation all his life, and it is accentuated in the difference between the way his father died and the way he himself died.

He never got a chance to be happy with the women he had loved (the two wives and the daughter). And the last scene was indeed about what it could have been instead of the last dramatic loss, but they choose to show another man who had not known the pain of losing at his happiest hour.

This is well past midnight and I have started blabbering. I just feel very sad for him when he dies alone in a dusty corner on a dusty chair silently and I realise that he had lost all the women he had ever loved.

Happy birthday to me! :)

That is how I see myself now. I am at the brink of losing my oldest friend. Even if he survives this, the severe strain our friendship has suffered will resolve itself to some terrible conclusion over time, and I can find happiness for the time being only in my incapacity to see ahead into the bleak future.

We can barely look at each other now in the guilty knowledge of what we have done together, and yet, that fateful evening began in the most promising manner.

I imagine people do some particular thing they get fixated on to find solace when they feel lovesick. I eat pizzas. I had just ordered my pizzas when Rainbow called me up to announce his arrival in town. So I packed up my order and went to his house. His folks were away, and we agreed that a late night movie date would not be out of order.

We caught up with our lives over the pizzas and salads, and he proposed me for marriage. Again! To be turned down. Again! He knows I am seeing someone now, and we talked a bit about that too. The pizzas duly finished, we dusted his museum-piece of a scooter and took it for a ride, yelling songs into the night and the cold breeze. Eventually we set out for a movie armed with junk foods to round the night up with.

We went to see Yuvvraaj. I did ask him if we couldn’t go see something else, but he said he wanted to see Yuvvraaj. I was also interested in the movie because from the promos it looked like Anil Kapoor had turned in an over the top performance and I wanted to watch it, and we went in together.

I don’t remember what happened in the following two hours very clearly. My doctor tells me that it’ll be a while before the trauma subsides and I can start to remember the events after I went into shock, and he clarifies that the complete memories of the night might never come back.

But I do remember a few distorted and blurred images of what had transpired before I lost my consciousness to the criminal attacks made on my senses by the movie. I remember people rushing in to lift me from the floor and I remember the long journey from there to the ambulance. I also remember the bright red bulb on the door of the operation theatre, and I have some recollection of the time in ICU afterwards. I don’t remember anything from the movie though, and my report asserts in no uncertain terms that the merest encounter with anything from that movie in the rest of my life time might drive me a raving lunatic.

But above all I remember that one glance Rainbow and I exchanged before we slumped unconscious into our respective seats. No matter how we are going to pretend to each other, we knew that we had reached the point where we couldn’t turn our back on the tragedy of having watched Yuvvraaj together and pretend as if everything was the same as ever.

I guess all good things come to an end. Rainbow has been my oldest friend through thick and thin, through rain and sun, through dangling genitalia to spotted underwears. As I write this now, he is still common-senseless in the hospital. It has often been observed that he didn’t have a lot of common sense to start with, but the movie Yuvvraaj introduces new depths to the meaning of imbecility. Rainbow’s brain damage might be irreversible.

So dear blog readers, pray for my friend’s soul, if not for his life. And as I have often said, the night is the darkest just before the electricity goes out.

—

Note: Unedited. Pestered with exams and no time to edit! Written over a seminar on Quantum Cryptography of which I did not understand one bit (I arrived half an hour late and spent the next one scribbling this one :)). But the one on Boolean Functions was interesting, if you really insist on being told!