(2) This is not autobiographical at all. I imagined a guy very different from myself writing this; so those of you who know me, don’t think of me when reading this, because the intended mood of the story is quite different. But had this piece been any good, I guess I would have claimed autobiographical influences. :)

(3) God knows that I have had enough trouble people reading themselves into my stories! Did I mention three unjustifiably broken friendships?! All girls! And it is not even me, always. Twice, the girls read my story and broke up their friendship(!) with other people!!! I guess they didn’t broke their friendship with me because we were not friends to start with (which, I’m ashamed to say, I have been thankful for). :)

Stump
———-
It is a stump now,
Its art gone,
Its ornaments all gone.

It does not stir with spring
Nor bend like a bow when green
Nor from its flowers fly KamaDeva’s arrows
Nor in its shades are sighs of travellers heard
Or tears of lovers seen.

Only one old bird
Sits remembering something.

‭(‬Translated from the Hindi of Suryakant Tripathy’s‭ “‬Nirala‭” ‬by Vikram Seth.‭)

(1‭)

A speck of fire rose along with the pile of ash and went up in small circles until it collided with the roof above and went out.‭ ‬I was trying hard not to burn my rectangular chapati and all I could manage was to spread hot ash throughout the verandah.‭ ‬Sipa’ni and Lipa’ni were laughing nearby and Rupa’ni was still insisting that I leave it to her.‭ ‬Dipa,‭ ‬as always,‭ ‬was standing some distance away with a detached look on her face.‭ ‬She never understood what she didn’t experience,‭ ‬and being happy was one of them.

It was a quiet evening.‭ ‬There was a musical loveliness about the crackles of the burning wood coupled with the indistinct hum of the fire.

I had just baked something frightfully similar to the rags nearby when I was told of my waiting call.‭ ‬I dashed through the pond and the gate and the grass and the theatre and the salt piles and picked up the receiver.‭ ‬A dog was barking in the distance,‭ ‬and held all my attention for the moment as I listened through the receiver.‭ ‬Finally,‭ ‬I put it down on the cradle.‭ ‬I was wondering if I was going to cry when a drop of tear fell down on my palm.‭ ‬I heard the dogs bark in the distance and remembered that I was yet to roll a round chapati.‭ ‬I ran back as fast as I could.

‬Suresh ka‭’ ‬was getting married the following week.‭ ‬I don’t remember everything that I went through that night,‭ ‬but I was weeping for her and for myself at the end of that night.‭ ‬And all these years I had thought that I had gotten over her‭!

(2‭)

Waking up in her house is an elaborate affair for men and a tedious routine for the women.‭ ‬To avoid waking up into a world that I hated,‭ ‬I tried to sleep as long as I could.‭ ‬But Tapan’s offer of the breakfast was irresistible and I finally woke up.

I walked out and sat down in one corner of the verandah and lazily started turning the pages of a Wodehouse while waiting for the others to come down and join me on my way to breakfast.‭ ‬The pond in the front yard which I had always remembered for rising mists in winter mornings was now being dried in order to catch the fishes for the marriage.‭ ‬For a moment my ears filled with the sound of rain pittering pattering on the surface of the pond as I lay their remembering the times I had been there trying to push her into the puddles of mud while we raced to jump into the pond every time it rained.

Then,‭ ‬I heard a familiar laughter and stood up to turn around and see if everyone was down.

Had I been more attentive to the occasion,‭ ‬I would have realised that she shouldn’t have been there at all.‭ ‬But I was so glad to see her grinning from ear to ear that I did not remember that it was the marriage of the man whom she had come to love so much in her downfall.

I might have remembered,‭ ‬eventually,‭ ‬given enough time,‭ ‬but the inchoate realization that she might have been smiling at the cousin standing in front of me wiped out all thoughts other than the one of humiliation from my mind.‭ ‬My face felt hot and my eyes started watering.‭ ‬I turned back and sat down on the verandah in the middle of‭ ‬all the hustle bustle to continue with the book I had been reading the moment before.

I never let the smile go off my face though.‭ ‬With great weakness come great will and enough power to hide it.

Then she surprised me with an embrace and a pat on my cheek with that grin of hers still on her face.‭ ‬Her eyes shone and I knew that they had been for me all along.

Hands on our hips,‭ ‬and carefree smiles on our faces,‭ ‬we talked for some time.‭ ‬She didn’t seem to mind the marriage any more.‭ ‬So many years,‭ ‬and she hadn’t changed on the surface except for getting thinner.‭ ‬The last time she had been to see me,‭ ‬it was to give me a small teddy bear which she said reminded her of me and to tell me to go win the world and find a decent girl to make love with who could play both the violin and cards.

Everyone was invited for the breakfast except for her.‭ ‬Probably she hadn’t been invited to a breakfast for the last six years.

She was a stranger in the house that she had every right to call her home.‭ ‬I couldn’t have helped her no matter how much I tried,‭ ‬and I certainly didn’t want to do it at her expense.‭ ‬I kept my remarks to myself and had a very nice breakfast.‭ ‬These days I had excellent breakfasts,‭ ‬because I had finally lost the illusion that I could change the world around me.

She tried to lie,‭ ‬but I knew everything already.‭ ‬Perhaps she needed the assurance that I loved her as much as I ever did even though she had once brushed it aside.‭ ‬Even though it didn’t mean a thing now to anyone except for me.‭ ‬I realised that finally it means something to her too.

‭(‬3‭)

We had first met in a musical concert.‭ ‬We were playing Pachelbel’s Canon; ‬violin and guitar,‭ ‬she and I.‭ ‬She was a terrible player and couldn’t be bothered to play her violin with any amount of attention.‭ ‬But what she lacked with the violin she more than made up for by her expressions.‭ ‬She looked so goddamn serious and passionate while playing in spite of all her frivolity that she made me want to walk up to her and kiss her every time she got that stage look on her face.

‭I couldn’t help but figure out that we were distantly related.‭ ‬And then there was the rain and I had to drop her home.‭ ‬Numerous card games and dinners at her house later,‭ ‬I told her that I was in love with her to the point of distraction and that I couldn’t possibly be expected to spend the rest of my miserable life without her.

Of all the things she could have done and said in reply,‭ ‬she laughed and told me not to be a silly ass.

‭(‬4‭)

It is always like that when you are young and fall in love.‭ ‬She means the world to you and she doesn’t want to deal with it.‭ ‬I grew up with a wounded heart,‭ ‬not knowing if I would ever live again.‭ ‬I did live,‭ ‬but I was never young again.‭ ‬And love though I did,‭ ‬it was never with my heart again.

And letters from her piled up in a corner to be picked up randomly to be cried over during the lonely nights when I wake up silently from the monotony of my sleep only to be reminded of her,‭ ‬to find no one sleeping next to me,‭ and ‬to stare at the rain crashing silently against the glass windows for the rest of the night.

‭(‬5‭)

I touched her hair and listened to her and held her hand in my hand while she told me all about the marriage that happened and the one that did not happen.‭ ‬Oh‭! ‬How could she pour so much of her affection where it was not cared for‭? ‬The man did not love her,‭ ‬and she didn’t know it.‭ ‬She didn’t know so many things‭ – ‬but I spared her the suffering of knowledge,‭ ‬for all her sacrifices had been a waste.‭ ‬She had suffered greatly,‭ ‬and she had suffered for nothing.

We played cards after the breakfast.‭ ‬Everyone insisted that I be paired off with her,‭ ‬we had been great partners in the old days.‭ ‬I didn’t see how much it was going to affect me.‭ ‬Every single movement of her brows brought back to me the memories of my happiest days with her,‭ ‬which made me only sad.‭ ‬Every time her lips trembled,‭ ‬uncertain whether to part or not in the moments of indecision,‭ ‬I grew more and more restless,‭ ‬for I had forgotten all about them in these years.‭ ‬She acted with all her gracious gestures as I remembered them,‭ ‬but the spontaneity and seriousness of her adolescence had been replaced by the indifference of her maturity,‭ ‬and it made me melancholic.‭ ‬I found that I had stayed back with the girl I fell in love with,‭ ‬and life had moved on.

‭Over these years,‭ ‬I have thought less and less often of her.‭ ‬She is like a scar that doesn’t hurt any more,‭ ‬one that I remember only when I see myself in the mirror or touch it by accident.‭ ‬Sometimes I think of what would have happened had my love been answered with love,‭ ‬but it doesn’t make me very sad.

I never stopped playing cards.‭ ‬I have come across many other gracefully exasperated women playing cards,‭ ‬but I have always associated those gestures,‭ ‬the slightest of which was enough to bleed my heart at one time,‭ ‬to the one who really made my heart bleed dry.‭ ‬It doesn’t bleed any more,‭ ‬and I never see anybody but her.

‭(‬6‭)

For sometime I was lost between my cousins,‭ ‬almost all of whom are would-be engineers,‭ ‬talking about their lives,‭ ‬studies,‭ ‬movies,‭ ‬stupid profs,‭ ‬booze,‭ ‬girls,‭ ‬all the usual topics.

We went for a walk and had all the kids for company.‭ ‬Half of them didn’t even know the poor fellow who was getting married,‭ ‬which I thought was sort of funny and appropriate and nice in a way.‭ ‬Tapan displayed tactfulness for the first time in his life and took care of the children so that we could have the walk to ourselves.

I am perpetually out of cash.‭ ‬I don’t mind it that much,‭ ‬really,‭ ‬except when I can’t offer to take the girl I am so desperately in love with to a dinner.‭ ‬She is never short of admirers,‭ ‬and she has been kind to everyone but me.

I didn’t sleep till she was back from her dinner.‭ ‬I am in my bed right now.‭ ‬I could have kissed her good night,‭ ‬but that would have embarrassed me.‭ ‬I am too conscious of all that I feel and it always shows up.

I wonder what is there for breakfast tomorrow.

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!

To be honest, I didn’t see that I was doing something wrong. I was not even trying to be clever, because I was so beyond trying to impress girls at that point of time, because Agnid was my roommate at that time ;), and I remember I didn’t even care enough to check out the photo album of that girl (in case she had none, I didn’t bother to check if she had one :)). I just like being obnoxious around Rainbow and I was a little insane at that time anyway. We have a long history of being obnoxious around each other. He is my oldest friend, by the way.

—– The Scrap —–

Translation courtesy babelfish

“u denigrate my responses as vague. whereas i only try to be as intelligible as possible, but the very fact of what I am does not permit or let me be lucid, at least to others.”
I am too smart to be understood by others.

“i am not a vague or complicated person, instead, i have as much simplicity as will find around you.”
I am not a simple person, because …

“neways i do not hold simplicity to be a virtue, simplicity is the most terrific defense that people seeking convenience put up. [1]”
… I think being simple is a refuge for idiots. Note the way I use verbs without proper subjects to increase the vagueness and avoid simplicity.

“and brevity of expression is the most potent and fertile way to tell the other person what exactly does a person mean to say. so i was just being exact.”
Since I couldn’t remember the word “precision,” I took a long winded tour in the first sentence in this part to state the obvious – this is another way of being vague. I hate being brief and exact.

“its unfortunate that you have processed the communication in a sense that has sufficient elements of irritation.”
Please interpret what I write the way I want you to, never mind the general lack of precision and direction. For example, here, the “sufficient elements of irritation” could be either for you or for me. To interpret it exactly, please read my mind [2].

Reference

[1] Even though it might appear meaningless, this sentence is sarcastic, because it is modeled after the famous style of aphorisms employed by Oscar Wilde predominantly in his plays.

[2] To know more about techniques of reading mind, Legilimency, please refer to the works of Severus Snape and Lord Voldemart, two accomplished exponents of the field.

Ah, but then I might be deluding myself. :)

And given how much books and people can influence me, no wonder I have acquired a new way of writing, thanks to hours of chatting. Now I use “like,” “as in,” smilies, “stuff,” “thing,” incomplete sentences, brackets, uncapitalised first letters and god knows what else! More informal and more relaxed, though I still spend hours trying to think up the right words to express exactly what I mean.

Which is another lesson I have learnt. No matter how precisely I try to put myself across, people will interpret me in terms of their lives, and the meanings will never be the same. So I might as well go for the most interesting expression instead of the most precise expression. But to unlearn myself’ll take time. I’ll quote Wilde – In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.

I updated my orkut profile after about two years, but now I am going to remove it all, going back to the nihilistic motif of my profile :), so I thought I’ll put the stuff here, now that I treat BL like a personal scrapbook!

I actually remember the last time I updated the profile, because I didn’t update the profile! I asked someone who is really great with women (he has a serious girlfriend now, and I have no idea if he would like his name mentioned, and anyway he didn’t appreciate being termed a womaniser in the farewell speech (I was the guy in charge of writing things for such occasions)!) to “train” me on how to go about chatting up women! So we sat down one day and (he) gave my profile to a very nice, respectable and stable makeover (though I like going crazy talking about me, we didn’t think it would win any brownie points with girls! so I told him what I liked and what I didn’t and he put it nicely there with the target audience on mind), and in general looked up some sensible girls, browsed through their blogs etc, and made some intelligent, sane and friendly comments.

(But how can I talk about that guy not mentioning that he is one of the best poets I know. not someone to write a nice poem or two once in a while, but someone who captures something of his life, and hence of all our lives, when he writes. he is there on the BL blogroll.)

I kept logging into Orkut for the next day. But those days I was more into Cecilia, and though I didn’t get to spend much time with her with so many in the crowd, we were always in touch, be it making the odd movies or playing games. (Cecilia was Anshul’s comp, and she took away many fond memories and a lot of important stuff, including my directorial and acting début, when she died :(. I don’t know how Anshul coped.). I forgot to log into Orkut for two months after that day and thus ruined the careful efforts of my poet friend.

Left to myself, I would go to people’s scrapbooks and post offending and sometimes disgusting limericks, though nothing as extreme as Achal’s crazy limericks. :)

In fact, that is how I met the girl I am seeing now! More about that in the next post.

WindowsXP, on the other hand, completely fell apart, failing even to boot up, and I’ll salvage the remnants when I have more time in my hands and less things on my mind. I wonder why people plough on under the impression that XP is more usable! And I also manufactured a reliable way to get the blue screen of death in XP SP2 (Hrishi claimed that blue screens of death were next to impossible things after SP2!). Try closing psiphon terminals after the tests are done! :)

My life seems to as elusive as ever when I try to make sense out of it, but falling in love has not been so bad. To tell the truth, I have stopped writing, but there are some random things I still want to talk about! So I will. The blog continues!

I also had a small personal anonymous blog for a while, and I had taken time off for that! But I have closed it now.

And Irene Adler lives on…

What made the inaugural Twenty20 final one of the greatest matches we have ever seen is the closely fought contest. The game twisted an tilted all through the game. Nobody had any idea till the last ball about who was going to win, and even when Misbah went on and scooped Joginder Sharma’s fuller delivery over short fine leg, I panicked for a moment thinking it was a boundary when the camera following the ball hovered in the midair. Then, in one exhilarating moment, as soon as the ball started coming down, I spotted Srisanth in the offing and my heart did a flipflop as I realised that India’s dream journey had finally come through.

It does remind one of the 1983 world cup. Underdogs, upstaging some of the biggest powerhouses in the world cricket to reach the final in a relatively new format. And then the enthralling final, where after being restricted to a low total against one of the most formidable bowling side the world has ever seen, we fought back with some champion bowling and fielding performances to win the final we never dreamed of even reaching. That could very well be a description of this world cup.

To say that India held its breath while Dhoni’s squad fought for their honour would hardly be an overstatement, at least from where I see. In my city. not a single vehicle moved. From the abandoned look of the streets, one could as well have thought that nobody lived there, except for the momentary uproars and screams of joy whenever a wicket fell, and, in the later overs, whenever a ball was left unscored.

Only he who has seen that silence of despair can know how eagerly these moments of victory had been awaited, and how special they feel.

I’ll take the messy and messed up tone of this post as a confirmation of Oscar Wilde’s aphorism – The purest of emotions produce only the worst kind of writings.

And yes, the unbelievers can now rest in peace. Twenty20 is here to stay.

I have just watched the irritating Heyy Babyy, which tries to pass off a lot of vulgarity in the name of comedy. It is one of the dumbest and most disgusting movies I have (unfortunately) seen this year. I am surprised by the amount of “critical acclaim” it has gathered.

There were some nice ideas, like Prof Parimal Tripathy (but the follow through was unsuccessful, because this was a movie made by the brainless for the brainless), but the sheer vulgarity of the movie overwhelmed everything else. I could grant them the suspension of disbelief and the attempts at crude juvenile humour, but their mindless abuse of the cinematic language to produce counter points to a point just made was too much to handle. At one side they introduce Vidya Balan (at the wedding) as a sharif and khaandaani girl, who is the least likely to engage in freelance romance, and right there we see a sexed up Vidya dancing provocatively, to the point of touching her own b**bs, and I ask myself, what kind of sharif and khaandaani girl did Sajid Khan, the director of the movie, had in mind?!

In case someone is looking for decent (sometimes great) comedies in recent times, I would advise him to try the ones from Priyadarshan and the one-offs like Khosla Ka Ghosla or Bheja Fry.

I saw promos of Om Shanti Om and Saawariya, and I’m sure these movies are going to be big hits. Om Shanti Om is a sure winner, because it does what no other movie has done before, recreating a version of our seventies’ movie culture, and as a result has a freshness that’ll appeal to the average cinema goer. Good luck to the SRK basher (me being one of them), but this is a movie in the right direction and SRK is the right choice for his part. But of course, the seventies’ version we are going to see in this movie is going to be very different then the seventies as we knew it.

The first few seconds of Saawariya were slightly disappointing, but soon I was enchanted by the sheer beauty of the images and the sequences waltzing through. The beats in the background promise a captivating score, and the intricately detailed imagery provoke a feeling of poignant yet joyful emotion that I can associate with love.

However, contrary to SLB’s claim that he is trying to reach back his roots as a filmmaker, trying to relive his early innocence, this movie, or at least the trailer, is a testimony to the maturity he has attained. There are a few stills which reminded me of Devdas and Black very strongly.

Talking of that, I believe this movie will make a kind of trilogy along with Devdas and Black. Devdas was dominated by the colour red, and Black, redundant to say, by the colour black. Whoever has seen the promos of Saawariya will agree to the opulence and dominance of the colour blue. Red – Black – Blue. I am talking nonsense.

Here is a rough selection of ten movies in my to-watch list (apart from Om Shanti Om and Saawariya) -

1. Transfermers -
2. I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
3. I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK
4. The Bourne Ultimatum
5. Zodiac
6. Love in the Time of Cholera
7. Vivaldi (Joseph Fiennes)
8. Boyhood
9. The Long Goodbye (Altman)
10. My Wife Is an Actress.

Note 2: To those who received the drafts – The reference to Robert Kolker was incorrect, which I discovered after going painstalkingly through his mammoth book again in an effort to quote him exactly (it contains the whole of GRE word list many times over). That would explain the delay. He said some nice insightful things though.

Note 3: This story, and its prequel, are officially declared to be ficticious accounts incorporating no characters inspired by anyone living or dead.

The Interview with the Professor

I didn’t understand the conclusion of the movie Micky One when I saw it for the first time. In fact, I didn’t understand it till I had seen almost all of Arthur Penn‘s defining works, till it occurred to me that violence was the underlining theme in his movies, violence overcoming a distance of some kind – distance created by blindness in The Miracle Worker (this is one reason I considered Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black plagiarised, he lifted this motif from Penn’s movie), impotence in Bonnie and Clyde (the doggerel was the immediate cue), paranoia in Mickey One (if you never understood the movie’s ending, this is the clue), the list goes on.

If one were to look at the underlining theme behind my fateful interview with Professor SS the next day, he would have discovered Mad Max, women, dope, James Bond, gang rape and Professor KV, all in that order.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me begin at the beginning.

To put it without much ado, I have never been the man for the bright sunny mornings, partly because I have never been an early riser, but that was a day well worth making an exception for.

I was up early for a consecutive second day. There was sunshine in my heart and there was sunshine on my face, and it made the world outside look more than it was worth. My heart swelled with the scent of the early morning breeze, cold and generously sprinkled with the dust from the construction sites around C**, and when my heart could hold it no more, it spilled out and became music for my soul. I joined it and sang with gay abandon, though my hostel mates later gave a different description of the events, but that might have been due to the quality of my singing. Nothing could get me down that day. Well, almost nothing, till I remembered my appointment later on that day with Professor SS.

That was my mood when I proceeded to the breakfast table. In retrospect, I think Ni(ved)ita and Pad(mav)ati might have been giving me murderous stares on that occasion, which, I am sad to report, were completely lost on me. An(irb)it did cast the hostile glares in my direction as usual, but that he did always anyway; except when he was mad with anger at me, in which case he took extra pains to be friendly with me and flashed all of his white set of teeth at me at every opportunity. Every time he did that, I would grab someone nearby and ask him to take our photographs together. Two old friends dining amiably. Two old friends looking at each other amiably. Two old friends smiling at each other amiably.

But this is not about that.

I took my usual place next to An(shu)l, Sou(men)dra and Riya on the breakfast table. After some moments of uncertain silence, Sou(men)dra spoke.

“You know what, I have a solution that will solve all your problems at one stroke.”

An(shu)l observed nonchalantly that the last time someone had said that, he came up with the nuclear bomb.

This made all of us contemplative for some time, at the end of which I asked Sou(men)dra about his solution, which turned out to be a bunch of excuses, brilliant and intricate but convoluted excuses, to evade the responsibility for my mail. I like to face the consequences of my actions, however, mostly because they are funny, and Riya supported me in this.

“You realise what you have done, right?”, she asked.

I was going to answer that yes I did, but then I remembered the last time I had said that. I asked what had I missed, and was made devastated in return.

To cut a long story short, SS had thought that my remark was intended for the girls, who also happened to be a minority (only three in the entire undergrad program). It wasn’t until much later that Shree[vat]sa remembered what was to us the only known abuse of Rolypoly, and it was a boy who had been the victim. Had this information come out in time, I could have been saved, but the smart chap who observed that comedy is all about timing forgot to notice that tragedy is all about mistiming irrespective of its Greek or Shakespearean or modern origins. Such is life!

I finished my breakfast and started for SS’ office with a heavy heart dragging my heavier feet.

When I coughed and said my slurred “ess-use me” to SS in his office, he was busy checking his e-mail. He looked back with a questioning glance and I introduced myself. He turned off the monitor, wheeled his chair towards me and rolled his sleeves.

“So you are that Mad Max character, eh? What the hell do you think you are?”

I couldn’t say that I was not pleased by that comparison, but etiquette demanded that I look guilty and sorry.

“You think you are smart huh? You think you can get away with this? What did you mean by that letter?”

I thought it was an invitation to explain myself. I am perpetually in the habit of committing this error. I mistake rhetorical speculations for literal questions and proceed to answer them.

“Sir, I think there has been a misunderstanding, I wasn’t thinking of the girls at all when…”

“Shut up,” he roared, “enough,” he paused for breath, “I thought what anyone in his right mind will think reading that disgusting mail, and you have no excuses to defend yourself. You have behaved very very irresponsibly, and you better be ashamed of it.”

He softened a bit at this point, “You see, women are a minority here, and we have to make them feel safe. What you have done is not only demeaning and insulting, it might also scare them,” his temper seemed to rise at the thought. “What are you, an egomaniac bastard? Do you think you are James Bond or something? Do you think you are so sexy that you can insult any of these girls?”

Again, I was flattered by the comparison and the compliment, but couldn’t thank him for it. He went on bellowing at me. Inspired by the excitement of the moment, he even stood up from his chair and started moving towards me little by little as he continued shouting at me. I thought it might be safer to stay close to the door and started inching towards it as he tried to corner me. At the end of ten minutes, we had both moved on to the corridor, and he had moved on to the gang rape part of my mail.

“And how, how could you write about such a sensitive issue like that? You think joking about rape is funny? Do you think gang rape is funny?” From there on, he went on to talk about something related to Dalits and Gang Rapes and the social problem that it is. He must have yelled “sex,” “dope,” “rape” and “gang rape” at least a dozen times within a span of a minute, at the end of which Professor KV, whose room was next to that of Professor SS, came out of his office to take active part in the discussion.

He listened silently for the next five minutes as Prof SS cruised through me. And then came the conclusion, “One should never do such irresponsible things. I think an apology mail should be sent.”

Finally seeing his chance to participate, Prof KV intervened timely, “Yes yes, I think that will be appropriate. You should immediately send a mail apologising.”

Except that he said it to Prof SS.

I was stunned for a moment. So was Prof SS. Then he recovered his speech and started yelling at Prof KV. “What do you mean I should send a mail? Why should I be sorry? What are you talking about?”

As the explanations and arguments grew in length and intensity, I decided that it was time I gave them a slip.

Everyone lived happily ever after.

And gave birth to that greatest of all date rape drugs?

Sweet Rolypoly, make my inbox immortal with thy presence.

It was one of those rare mornings when I stepped out of my room after a night of peaceful slumber and not a night spent in doing whatever it is that idle hostellers do while not sleeping in the nights while fitful gusts whisper here and there outside among the bushes half leafless and dry, and while stars look very cold about the Chennai sky. Keats, sonnet IX.

I am a bit fanciful as far as the outside world is concerned. I spend almost all of my time in tiny rooms, so I feel excited whenever I have a chance to step outside. My brain might have been culturally preprogrammed, but I like the feel of bright warm sun on my skin, and I like the way my hair feels when the wind brushes past my neck and my ear.

As I stepped outside, the coolness of the morning breeze filled my lungs. The almost dewy air touching my cheek felt like pricks, but they softened the sight of the bright sun rays. It looked almost as radiant as that bright morning scene in a Tim Burton movie where the hero, pronounced dead in the Vietnam war, had returned to kiss his betrothed. It was my first morning sun in two months.

To many the best part of waking up early in C** might seem to be the beautiful mornings. But as beautiful as the mornings are, to a more discerning mind, no doubt it is the breakfast in the mess which would be the best part, particularly when one didn’t have it in the past two months in spite of being charged for it. I guess all undergrad hostels are full of such optimists who plan turning a new leaf in their lives starting with regular breakfasts, but never wake up in time.

Since I had neither been pronounced dead nor was I engaged to any girl waiting for me to be kissed, not that I mind kissing girls I am not engaged to, I proceeded towards the canteen.

As I was making my way, I spotted Riya in the distance. The basket in her hand was full of Jasmine. Her white dress and the white flowers and her wet hair filled up my head, and I yelled to ask her if the spring had arrived. She stopped near me while passing and like always, bent her head slightly, looking at me from the corner of her eyes with a nice smile that always demands reciprocation. Usually she speaks coyly after this ritual acknowledging my existence, “Yeh tum ho kya (Is that you)?” But today she only offered me a flower and went away. I wanted to stop and tell her that she had made me a fine day, or a fine morning at least. After a moment of hesitation, however, I decided that not missing my breakfast was more important.

The first hints of grey clouds appeared in the horizon when Jay(ant)h stopped me while I was entering the mess and exclaimed, “What were you thinking?” I was going to observe that that he looked incredibly handsome, but he did not wait to hear the compliment. I realised that the question had not been literal. It meant there was something I did not know, something I should have known, something I must know at once.

I finished by breakfast as soon as possible and went to the lab to check my mailbox. There was only one mail waiting for me there. It was from Professor SS, who had no business sending any kind of mail to me. I opened it anyway. It had two lines, and all the letters were capitalised. It ran thus -

WHO IS THIS INCORRIGIBLE INTROVERT?

REPORT TO ME AT 9AM SHARP TOMORROW.

I noticed that the mail had been CCed to all undergraduates. It was true that I had attended only one of his lectures that semester, but that was not reason enough for such a rude mail, particularly when one considers my attendance in other classes. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t even know who I was, because he had once chastised A(cha)l mistaking him for me.

Then I checked the mail it came in reply to, and my heart sank.

An(irb)it, whenever he is inspired to be kind to his fellow human beings, sends them spam. On the previous night, he had sent us a spam about some phoney Date Rape Drug called RolyPoly, and had warned us that someone might want to try it on us.

I found the suggestion extremely ridiculous, of course. For one thing, a significant proportion of the population wouldn’t even mind being date raped (yes, scarcity of girls can do that to you. it’s all hormones.). And who in his right mind would want to dope and date rape a C** student anyway?!

Before going to sleep, I said as much in reply to his mail -

Who in his right mind would want to dope and date rape a C** student anyway?!

For some inscrutable reason, An(irb)it’s recipient list had included SS, which I did not notice before hitting on the “reply all” button. That explained the state of the affairs that far.

My mail had been an instant success. Everyone who had considered me a waste of space before now wanted to give me all sorts of advice, and assured me that even though he lacked that thing called temper, SS was fundamentally a nice man. I couldn’t go through the corridor without being interrupted by people who wanted to know all about the affair. I was an instant celebrity.

I tried to live up to everyone’s expectation for a while and tried being miserable. After being miserable for some time, I went on to join An(shu)l in watching a movie in his room. That night, I went to bed early so that I could wake up in time to meet him. With a curious sense of foreboding, I fell asleep.

To Be Continued… (very soon)

2) Invariance of c:
The speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant (c) which is independent of the motion of the light source. Just the assumption that there was a maximum velocity might not have been that profound. But add to that the insignificance of the light source, and you have got an Einstein in your hands.

However, to be more fair, the profundity lies in the mathematics behind special relativity, the credit for which goes also to Maxwell and Poincare.

3) Gravity:
There is nothing worthwhile that I can say about this, almost everything I might want to point out has been said already. I particularly liked the biography by James Gleick, where he tries to tell us how Newton was the least Newtonian entity in a world that was rapidly becoming Newtonian.

Not withstanding A(nir)bit’s qualms, the world we live in is still Newtonian.

However, I don’t count Newton’s invention of calculus as a fundamentally new idea. Calculus had been in making for a long time, and Newton happened to be one of the few first rate minds who simply stepped in and put it all together.

At the heart of Calculus lies Continuity and Differentiability. I have already mentioned Continuity, and Differentiability is an extension/generalisation of Continuity.

4) Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle:
My views of him (and his principle) are biased because of my intense admiration for the man. I rationalised my initial fascination later when I struggled to understand his principle of uncertainty in its mathematical rigour without getting lost in idle philosophical speculations.

For me, he was the coolest physicist, almost failing his practicals yet getting his degree by a brilliant thesis, he epitomised the arrogance of the theorists who look down upon the practical work (I am not saying it was his personal attitude, but one couldn’t find a better idol to imitate).

5) Godel’s incompleteness theorem:
I finally shook up the philosophical rants and looked through the theorem itself only recently. I had a misconception about the way Lobachevsky went about the fifth postulate of Euclid, which A(rule) corrected sometime back.

I forget who said this – “God exists because mathematics is consistent. The Devil exists because we can’t prove it.”

1)B(han)u and A(rna)b were chatting.

S(hou)vik – A(rna)b, don’t listen to him, he is gay.
B(han)u (indignantly) – I am not gay, I am broadminded.

2) S(hou)vik – Are you changing your room partner to Ramprasad?
Bhanu – No no, it’s difficult to make a new relationship in such a short time.

For the sake of records, Beli was Bhanu’s partner in room (and anything else that we don’t know of yet).

3) S(hou)vik – I am a narcissist. I look at myself in the mirror and masturbate.

The Annie Hall Effect

And this one time in our hostel ;), we watched Annie Hall after I insisted that everyone does so. The following scene inspired us, and a string of comments followed -

Alvy Singer: Oh stop it, you’re having an affair with your college professor, that jerk that teaches that incredible crap course, Contemporary Crisis in Western Man…
Annie Hall: Existential Motifs in Russian Literature. You’re really close.
Alvy Singer: What’s the difference? It’s all mental masturbation.
Annie Hall: Oh, well, now we’re finally getting to a subject you know something about.
Alvy Singer: Hey, don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love.

4) Ar(ghy)a (when An(shu)l suggested that we should have a GBM (general body meeting) as soon as possible) -
What’s the point? Democracy is just vocal masturbation.

5) S(hou)vik (when I asked about his physics experiment report) -
That is experimental masturbation.

6) S(hou)vik (on Einstein and Philosophers and their futility) -
All philosophical orgasms are faked.

7) I don’t remember who came up with the question, but we all seeemed to come up with the answer at the same time, though independently.

Q: What’ll A(nir)bit’s autobiography be called?
A: Physical Masturbation!

8) An(shu)l (when I said I am going to put all that in my blog) -
History will be on your side, because you’ll be masturbating it.

It was an open secret that Anu Malik is an idiot. After today’s episode, it is not a secret anymore. He wrongly commented on the personal life of one of the contestants (to Deepali, your crush is crushing your voice. How cheeky is that?!). When cornered by the righteous Alisha Chinai, he employed three different devices of rhetorics (stalling techniques, more accurately) to evade the issue and justify himself. It could have been four, but one of his techniques constituted of making completely irrelevant statements and my knowledge of rhetorics is too poor to place it.

Anyway, some poor guy got eliminated today, and an ironic performance ensued from the other contestants that could easily have been dubbed hilarious. For the guy getting out the sorrow was genuine enough, and he took it very sportingly. Some of his mates shed some real tears too, particularly one of the girls who was with him in the danger zone. The rest of them were just pathetic, and it was hilarious to see them hide their faces with their palms so that we could not see their faces. I mean, they were supposed to be sad, and they were supposed to cry. But they failed to produce any amount of tears (we can’t blame them, the euphoria of not having been eliminated can be overwhelming) and tried to make up for it by hiding their faces and refusing to look up!

The host, Mini Mathur, however, had an easier time. After joking around with the poor eliminated guy for sometime, assuring him that he’ll be dearly missed, she simply went backstage and put some glycerin in her eyes and came back for the end credits, where she cried her heart out. I hope she gets paid well. She has to keep crying like this for seven or so weeks more.