Since a weak story is a prerequisite in this sub-genre, I suppose The Avengers is a success.

The Script
The script is fairly well-written. The humour works and is well-paced. It keeps the audience from wandering away before the (climatic) action-sequences begin.

Character Development
Iron Man is one of the funniest superhero characters on screen today, and he delivers yet again. His quirky sense of humour seems to spill over other characters in The Avengers, including the boy scout Thor! Oh wait, Captain America is the new boy scout, and the contrast in between his character and Iron Man’s has been exploited well and they mark some of the best and the funniest moments in the movie.

While the characters themselves are developed without any depth (there are weak attempts at back stories, but the focus is always on moving on and getting into action, so they are not boring), the interactions between them develop nicely. Even the usual bromance becomes interesting in the hands of Iron Man, who develops an affinity for the reclusive Hulk.

It’s not all about just funny lines either. The Black Widow, who I was afraid will come undone without funny lines to back her up, manages to stay interesting thanks to the essence of her character being written into her scenes.

Acting
It’s well acted etc, but who really cares?

Visual Effects
The best in the trade.

Final Rating: 3.5 out of 5. A good entertainer for families without young adopted kids.

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.

Thanks to Anshul for his editorial help. Thanks to Sourasis for his awesome one liner.

Watch out, Hitler has a lot more to say on Cricket.

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! ****