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.

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.