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.

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

I don’t really like the tropical green in general, and indeed I was thinking how ugly all the bushes next to the road side looked, when suddenly a miniature version of the Great Wall of China came interrupting the wild growth. It turned out that the institute is going to be inside the infamous reserve famous for its wild, renegade and usually angry horde of stampeding elephants who frequent the nearby villages and have unwittingly claimed human lives before (hence the walls to stop them). This means even though I might one day fall in love with The Pretty Girl and might want to walk under the moonlight in misty nights with my arm on her waist (with a passionate kiss or two in the offing), an elephant’s bone might prove to be too big a haddi in the Kebab to be overcome.

When we arrived, I was surprised when I noticed that I could hear the birds chirp and flutter.

The Director showed us the construction plans, and The Pretty Girl (she has got dimples) asked him if the academic block was modelled after the first letter of his name (the chic of it!). With a polite laugh, he then went on to explain, “No. You see, these are two spirals, and this end of this spiral here …”

As The Pretty Girl once told me, she is allowed to do everything, but her mom once asked her not to do anything that she would ever have to regret. That probably includes boyfriends, because she feels immensely guilty every time she gets close to a guy! This time, she got somewhat close to The Moustache Guy (when he had his moustache) and then felt terribly guilty about it and suddenly stopped talking to him. On the Rakhi Day, she came with a Rakhi and insisted that The Moustache Guy accept it! Through some curious twistings of words and manners and unintelligible gurgles, The Moustache Guy accepted the Rakhi with the declaration that he is accepting it only to pass it on to me!

I pointed out to him that things were probably over between them anyway. He is cool about the whole deal, because nothing much had happened to start with, but I guess they are not going to be seen together in the library for long hours now. :(

There is a small pond inside, scantily filled with dirty water, but I assume that it’ll be put in shape once we move in, given the amount of fuss people make about co and extra curricular activities. Even though there is a lot of room to be spared in the campus, playing cricket doesn’t seem to be an option. After I expressed my scepticism over the chances of locating a ball after I have hit it, the air was thick with all sorts of poor jokes about the ball coming back on the trunk of an elephant (and similar boring variations).

Some were disappointed given the isolation and the seemingly dull environment, but I felt serenely elevated. The mountain lines could be seen in the distance, and the whole place looks likes a tame opening to an overwhelming wilderness. Wide green fields were to be seen past the ugly bushes next to the road, and their stretch undid the damage their shade of green might have done to their beauty. I hope the construction gets delayed, so that I get to stay there for a few months or so, so that I would have moved out and gone on long before they all lost their charm to familiarity.

To be honest, I don’t think I would mind a brush or two with the infamous elephants. May be I’ll rescue The Pretty Girl from them when she ventures out one day into the Forbidden Forests, rendered reckless with the recurring restlessness of her routine (she is that type), when there is no one to save her but I. And then after I have rescued her, in the unnerving exhilaration of her escape, she might even kiss me in a heedless abandonment of grace. It’ll take some work to draw the girl out of the prude, but thankfully it is not going to be my task. Good luck to The Moustache Guy. :)

And then there was the sysadmin who cracks excellent poor jokes, but they are not probably his own.

So the rabbit and the tortoise (of that famous race where the rabbit lost thanks to his overconfidence) decide to study mathematics. They appear in the entrance, and they score the same. But the tortoise is finally selected over the rabbit. Why?

The answer – sports quota. He cracked this when we were discussing about the reservation issue after someone inquired after the reservation policy of the institute!

Talk about not having a life!

A week or two more while we tidy up the site, and then we’ll open up for another season starting from the 1st of this March.

Do remember to come back.