my first bike..not really

I was really young when this happened and I just remembered this today while coming back to Jacksonville. At the time this happened I was living with my parents in our ancestral home at Tripunithura, Kerala state, India.

One day everyone in the house was in an uproar and the only thing I could glean from my various uncles was that a new bike was coming to the household. Now, somewhere between the point where I acquired this 'intel' and the point of doom as we shall refer to it I got it into my head that this bike was for me. Wheres the logic in a kid getting a bike? go figure, when you're a child everything seems possible.

Soon the new bike arrived and I was uber excited. My first clue that something was wrong was when my mom prevented me from going down to see 'my' new bike. Im sure that internally i was yelling with righteous indignation, after all how could I ride my bike If i was not even allowed to see it.

To make things worse this one uncle of mine rode in on the bike, walked all around it, sat on it, rode on it some more and was generally treating it like his own property (it was..!!). This was the last straw!! Not only do they not let me get to my property they were also enticing me by letting others use it. My blood boiled at the events as they were happening around me. At that instant, i'm sure that all my warrior ancestors were watching down from wherever they were, intently cheering me on.

Due to me being quite small I could do nothing more than be righteously indignant.

Later on I remember wandering around the bike checking it out and then somehow I got the bright idea of pressing my leg against the engine or radiator or some other hot part. Suffice to say that it hurt a lot.

By the time I stopped yelling my mother and aforementioned uncles had gathered around me and after surveying the damage they carried me inside. The burn on my leg hurt like hell for the first few days and then a glorious boil developed at that point. This boil was gross in appearance (unlike the more popular jock variety of boils) and all I wanted to do was to POP it. This sentiment did nothing to reduce my utter shock when my mom advanced upon me with a needle in her hand and something resembling a grin on her face. Turns out popping the boil didnt hurt as much as I thought it would and my leg looked much less gross.

I never really got a bike. Not in my high school, not in college, and not even in post grad education. I do drive cars but never bikes even though I am licensed to drive both 4 and 2 wheelers.

Fishtail..

Today I was talking to my mom like I always do when she said something that caused me to go back. Once when we were driving either from chennai to cochin or from cochin to chennai, there was this railroad crossing kinda place. We had a lorry parked right in front of us, waiting for the train to pass and let us through. As soon as the bar preventing us from crossing the tracks was lifted my mom, who was at the wheel, got a sudden burst of inspiration from the spirit of Speed Racer (I'm assuming he died since no one who talks that long without taking a breath lives to be too old). My mom revs the car and overtakes the lorry and is heading for the tracks (the lorry guy gave her the little wave by signal which stands for "you can quit bugging me and just go on now" ).

Suddenly we had a lorry bearing down on us from the opposite direction and even though my mom tried to get us completely out of the way she was only partially successful. The result was that a good portion of the car was dented and an even greater portion of my mom's ego was bruised (See....she had thought herself capable of teaching speed racer a thing or two, one thing about driving and another about breathing in between sentences).

As we proceeded on the atmosphere in the car was weird. We knew that once we got back to Cochin, oh yea, thats where we were going, our relatives would be all over this. There would be all sorts of theories flying around the place like "She was drunk", "Family has no control", "Bad car", "She was drunk", "Faulty railway gate", "Government must change", "Global warming", "She was drunk" and so on. In order to avoid this we decided to come up with a believable story upon hearing which people would like at us with golden sympathy dripping from their faces and also, all the alcohol related issues would fail to exist any longer.

I was so excited at this prospect of being able to contribute to such an important story, and it was at this point that I uttered the magic word. "FISHTAIL".

I had come across this word in some tintin comic or somethin and I thought it sounded pretty cool.

Y'all know how the tail of a fish moves in a direction opposite to the rest of its body right? Well, this word is also used in connection to the movements of objects other than fish (yes, and also seaweed..come on..!!).

Suddenly everyone was thinking about this concept, of telling the folks back home that the lorry fishtailed into us thereby causing the damage seen on the car.

Whether that story ever saw the light of day I do not remember, but the creation of the story in itself was as grand an adventure as I could have hoped for at that point.

I think even my little brother threw in a few comments here and there.

I just wanted to record my memories of that event.

magus.

True Darkness

Ever get the feeling that you are well and truly insignificant? This is probably the point at which the descent begins. An initiation into the paths of darkness.

Slowly a crack appears in your personality and you realize that you are leading two lives. On the surface you smile, make jokes and navigate the pathways of this system we call life. Inside, there is a perpetual storm in progress.

Voices rising from the abysmal depths of your own being, mocking, criticizing and carrying on an endless commentary on what the outside world is thinking of you.

Music helps in quieting these voices or at least drowning them out. The main problem arising from this is that you tend to become self destructive.

In my case this has manifested in a not so harmful way. I am not at immediate risk of finding an entertaining and quick way to end my existence which in a way is good I suppose.

I have been getting calls from various people asking me to play in bands with them and though I accepted a few of these I am always on the verge of calling them up and quitting from the project.

Why? I dont know, I simply find myself stuck on the question "What is the point?".

When do you know that your life is pretty much screwed? The day you wake up and cant find a strong enough reason or will to stand up and live through the day.

I am a huge believer in fantasy and magic and even science fiction but maybe the reason why I like these things is because they are suggestions that maybe there are things out there other than this suffocating monotony of existence. I shall not delve too deep into that line of thought since I dont want to take away three of my four reasons for continuing to breathe.

Sometimes I think that maybe I was never meant to be here to begin with. I have always felt like an outsider. When in school I thought that maybe once I left India I would find my own kind of people, this belief became increased tenfold when I was in college since my life then was so much more crappy. I came to the USA and found no one here even remotely like me, if anything, they were even more removed from me than my countrymen.

Thats when hope died in me that my isolation and misanthropy was caused by simple incompatibility with my immediate neighbors. I fear that it is caused by incompatibility with the race as a whole.

I often tell a few people I talk to that I am a high elf. In almost every tale I have read the high elves have left the land and retreated to their homeland which is hidden from mortal eyes by the strongest magic. I would like to believe this and hope that one day I shall lay my eyes on the golden shores of my homeland.

Almost reminds me of the song from the disney movie Hercules.

I have often dreamed, of a far off place,

where a heroes welcome, is waiting for me

where the crowds will cheer, when they see my face

and a voice will whisper, this is where im meant to be

I'll be there someday

I can go the distance

I will stay my path

I wont accept defeat

I know every mile

will be worth my while

when I go the distance, I'll be right where I belong...

I think I am still capable of a little hope.

Wraith.

Living the Indian Dream..what it means

I am sure that most of you have at one point or another heard of the usage "yeah that guy, hes livin the American Dream". Well, even though the american dream is no concrete list of things we all have a basic idea of what it might involve. A good home, a good looking car, an even better looking wife, a son and daughter who are basically replicas of barbie and ken (not necessarily in that order) and so on. The Indian dream however, is a mysterious thing.

Upon close examination one finds that it resembles a nightmare more than it does a dream.

Before I embark upon this there is something else I need to do.

"To all of you Indian boys and girls out there who have taken up professions other than being an engineer or a doctor, my hat (if I were wearing one) is off to you. I salute your courage and determination".

Now, I shall embark upon this voyage exploring the Indian dream. (Think of a scene kinda like when the titanic was pulling out from the docks, only this time there are no onlookers, just a bunch of pissed off turkeys (Why were the turkeys pissed? All in due time shall be made clear) and there were no joyous and merry people standing on the deck of the ship waving to the crowd (turkeys) theres only a couple of drunk homeless guys who are eyeing the turkeys while frothing at the corners of their mouths. Finally, there is no ship, only me wading out into the water and then feeling extremely stupid coming back onto land narrowly avoiding the gang war that has by now erupted between the homeless guys and the turkeys.

When I asked my little brother the other day "Hey man, what do you wanna become when you grow up?" he took about 10 seconds before replying "I wanna play in a band, and if that doesn't happen then I wanna be a computer game designer". He has this plan to develop a MMORPG which is so massive in scope that it will in effect be an alternate life that people can lead. The idea has some mind boggling merits and some mind numbing stupidity but then again thats why it stays an idea for the moment I suppose. I am proud of my lil bro because he wants to work in something thats fun to him. I hope he gets the chance.

I am working on an internship in jacksonville, its only for four months out of which two are almost done, but still I quake in fear at the thought of returning tomorrow to work. The work is killing me from the inside.

(funny reference: Killing me softly with this code, you are killing me softly with this code, coding my whole life with c sharp, killing me softly, ....crash...bleep...bleep...BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH)

My friends back in India they tell me about what they do and even they are deeply unhappy and extremely dissatisfied with the way things are going.

When we call home however, we have to pretend that everythings going great because otherwise our parents are going to worry that we have lost our way and so on. Therefore, in order to make sure that we dont have a bunch of angry and worried relatives staging some kind of pseudo intervention every time we sigh, we put on a mask everytime we talk about our work.

"Hows the job?"

"Fantastic, I am getting so many nice projects"

"Thats good, and you are doing everything properly"

"No, I shit on my code before giving it in"

"what was that?"

"Yes, I said, I fit in my code into what the company is doing"

"ok.....so looking good huh? career prospects?"

"Yes, definitely"

"Good, good. Now, your future is secure"

"No, its pretty much blown to hell"

"what was that?"

"I said, its pretty much blown to hell...."

"Explain yourself young man"

you can kinda get the picture about where this is heading.

Now, I am not saying that all families have the same kinda attitude towards complaints about work. One common thing however is that we are dissatisfied.

You go through school, college, higher ed and get a job and then its like you're in that car which after managing to struggle up the slope just kinda gave up and leaped right off the cliff but instead of falling or rising or doing anything at all, you are just suspended there like the butt of some cruel cosmic joke. Its downright depressing.

So what is the great indian dream? simple.

We shall never chase our true dreams.

We shall become software engineers, the pawns of the system.

We shall live hoping for a better tomorrow but never doing anything to get there.

We shall watch bad hindi soaps and curse them , but still watch em again.

sounds more like a nightmare to me.

peace.

Magus.

stormy skies..

Just today i was returning from work and it was all overcast outside. Only one word leapt to my soothed mind...."Beautiful". A lot of people wake up, look outside, see the sun and hear the birds, and remark about how it is a beautiful day. If i venture outside on such a sunny day, I usually feel sick to the core. I dont really know why. When it is overcast outside somehow it is calm inside as well.

Many people have told me that England has mostly overcast weather, if this is the case I would love to live there for good. It really is difficult to explain exactly how good I feel inside when there are dark clouds overhead. I shall now recount an instance from my college life which is in a similar tone. I've probably already mentioned this incident before in this blog, but I dont really care since im sure that no one reads this neway. More than anything else, this blog is a journal, for the older me to read about the younger me and laugh my old ass off (i hope i dont do that, cause i hear that hip related problems are real bitchy.)

We had this one course called mechanical workshop in our first year of engineering. This course should have been named something like "Making yourself feel like a caveman again 101" or something because that was essentially what it did. We had to do stuff like cut perfectly useful metal sheets, file em and make them into completely useless shapes. We were made to do this why? Because snot shaped pieces of sheet metal were coming into vogue as new age paper weights? Because the ninjas in Japan realized that there was a more efficient design for the shuriken? I don't think anyone really knows..

I sucked at this course, partially because I didnt get the point, but mainly because I've never been a brutish kinda guy. Let me put it this way, if I was in middle earth I would be an elf and not a human. As of a result of the aforementioned sucking at the course I came home after the class mostly with a collection of bruises, cuts and other such battle scars on my arms. Once I even managed to cut myself with the handle, note HANDLE, of a wood file.

So things went along this way and we were taking our final exam. I was given some kinda sheet metal thing to do and as always i was clueless on how to actually do it.

Thankfully, my mates standing around me helped me out and got me through the actual making part of it. When it came to the viva voce I used my speechcraft to such an extent that the sir was firmly convinced that I was descended from a long line of noble blacksmiths (nothing could be further from the truth).

After I was done with the exam I walked outside thinkin bout catching a private bus back home since I didnt wanna wait for the college bus which was a half hour away. I saw my friend sreeraj walking out of the wood workshop and I was like "Oi..!! How was it?" to which he replied with a single finger gesture. After the inevitable exchange of obscenities which though not strong enough to surprise a sailor would definitely make a sailor stop in his tracks and go "ahem..well...carry on then.." or something to that effect (for those of you who find that sentence too complicated, turn off ur laptop and take up some easier task like say.....being a lumberjack...or sandalwood smuggler....see, you always have options.)

We were talking and walking towards this one shop where we drank lemonade usually. Thats when a cool breeze ran right through me. I looked up at the sky and it was dark. It was so peaceful and serene. There was an anticipation in the air as if the very earth was waiting for the rain to touch down. This affected both me and my buddy and we were both talking about this for years to come. We talked for a while and then got on the college bus and went home by which time it had started raining heavily.

After getting down from the bus I decided to walk home in the rain, got completely drenched and was henceforth referred to by tripunithura-ites as "he who walks in the rain" and by a few as "he who is not too well in the head" and by a small tribe in africa as "wakalooloo the rain god reborn".

However, it was a beautiful day.

mage lord.

To be here, or not to be here....

No, this one is not about philosophy or anything. The title is exactly what this one is goin to be about. I had an experience today which made me think about a lot of stuff related to being in the United States of America.

I came back from the office today and as is my habit raided the fridge only to find that we had run out of bread. As all bachelors know an apartment without bread is something inconceivable and so I decided to go to walmart and get the aforementioned bread (yes, I love using the word 'aforementioned' so sue me!!..............on second thought please don't.. :-) )

My walk to walmart was uneventful except for when i was crossing the main intersection and even though the walk sign was on I heard a vehicle from my left coming in fast. I looked to the left and saw this truck coming towards me, slowing down in the process.

Seeing this somehow made me smile in a weird way and I was looking at the truck. I guess the driver thought I was staring him down or something, its not like he said anything or did anything, but something in the way he looked back at me suggested that he had taken offense at something I had done (unless it was my mere presence that bothered him....more on that later).

I got to walmart without any further incident.

After picking up the bread and some chicken to keep it company in the cold confines of our fridge I was on my way back. While crossing the same darn intersection I had reached the other side when I heard a horn honking. In the states you hardly ever hear vehicles using their horns and they only do this if someone else on the road is committing or has already committed some wrong action. Considering this you can understand that I was suddenly on the alert.

I turned to the direction from where the honks were coming and this truck passed me by (not the same one as before, this was more like a truck SUV hybrid..). The guy sitting near the window put his head out and laughed loud, real loud. The laugh was not supposed to be a funny one. In fact, this laugh had not confusion about its identity, it had a card in its bag which clearly stated that it was a laugh created for only one purpose, to mock.

The guy was mocking me.

At the moment I shook my head at this and walked on not really indicating any other emotion. As I walked on however I started thinking about what had happened. Why did the guy do what he did? He doesnt know me, I dont look particularly threatening, and I was not doing anything particularly offensive to anyone except for the chicken in my possession which I admit is a gray area. The only reason why he could have done what he did was because I am not white. There are other streams of thoughts into which this can be sub divided but not without further information so I shall leave it at that.

This made me wonder again, what if he had not simply laughed, what if he had thrown something at me, run me over, pulled over a little ahead and then beat me up or robbed me when I got close, or something even worse. What if?

The question ultimately comes down to this

"How much are you willing to risk for earning lots of money?" (which is not even true in my case, but never mind that)

I miss India..I miss Kerala....I miss my home..

magus.

Vindicated..

There is a feature which I try to put into most of my posts, I do not know if I have been successful in it. I try to start off each post by mentioning the song I am listening to while writing it. At the moment I am listening to the song vindicated by the band dashboard confessional. For an alternate rock/Sissy wimpy rock band....they have done a pretty amazing job with this song. The lyrical quality is outstanding and can actually be likened to poetry which is much more than what can be said about music in general these days (hip hop anyone?).

In my opinion the song talks about life and its related insecurities in general though it does this from a slightly romantic perspective. The first line of the song goes "Like hope dangles on a string like slow spinning redemption, winding in, winding out, the shine of it has caught my eye"...pure poetry and nothing else.
The chorus goes as follows,
"Vindicated,
I am selfish I am wrong
I am right I swear I am right
I swear I knew it all along
and I am flawed
but I am cleaning up so well
I am seeing in me now
the things you swore you saw yourself..."

beautiful aint it?

Right now I am working on an internship in Jacksonville, Florida. Yeah, I finally managed to get one and I am so damn happy. Except for the last part of the previous sentence everything in this post has been completely true. I am not so damn happy, in fact I am not even any kind of happy.
The work is commonplace and extremely boring and most of the time my employers dont seem to know what to do with me which in itself is quite worrying. There was a career fair in our university recently and I went for it thinking about somehow getting a better and more interesting job.
Every single company I went to had the same frikkin reply "Hey, yeah, give us your resume, but also apply online ok? We are not saying that this was a completely pointless waste of your time but if you cant figure that one out yourself then we were not gonna hire you anyway....so, have a nice day...and here take some free goodies which are actually various somethings which were lying around in our homes and which we could not get rid of in any other way"
long sentence?
you should've seen the length of the queues...
The only redeeming part about the day was....oh wait there was none...
So many people dressed up in their finest, waiting in queue holding on to a piece of paper in which they have tried to sum up their knowledge in as few a number of lines as possible (in many cases coming up with interesting and wildly inappropriate abbreviations). The air was crackling with the energy of their hopes and dreams and the dry responses from the employers shooting down the aforementioned hopes and dreams.
My abbreviations were cool too, I had lines in my resume which read,
Proficient with CRAP (Commercial regression advance planning)
Well versed in NOTHING (New order of theoretic hyper imaging neo genesis)
and also
Certified master of bullshit-jutsu!! (now that one I just made up now...)

For those "critics" among you who point out that I did not include the second 'o' in the abbreviation NOTHING, guys, seriously????

The day was extremely disappointing...and so were the two days after that when I had to return to work, get shunted off from a project since I had done something completely different from what they had asked me to do, get explanations from both the supervisor and the CEO about how "your work was good, great vision and excellent quality, we're just gonna go a different direction on this one...ok?". Doesn't that last line sound weirdly similar to "Its not you, its me..." probably the most cliched break up line ever...
and guess what....after tomorrow I get to go back to another week of that amazing life...yea...wow..cant hardly wait..

more cynical than ever,

magus.

Worst bus ride ever:

well it was not really a bus, more like a van of sorts but the rest of the title is spot on. So remember the point to which I had recounted the tale last time? We were on our jolly way to this spot called Waagamon (yea I know, whats the deal with the name right?....) and things started off smoothly enough. My first indication of trouble should have been the strange behaviour exhibited by my best buddy vysakh, but I was too busy trying to act like a potential boyfriend/best friend character. I sat right next to her, chattering non stop about this and that, and always trying to steer the conversation around to this new and interesting concept of 'us'.

We stopped for breakfast at this small inn like place (only much less cooler than the inns of yore..). Since the folks taking us on this trip were christians they had no qualms about eating non veg for breakfast, which was an issue I had. I ate like one roti or something along with some curry the nature of which I dare not investigate and then we were off again. I ate only one roti partially because it was not that good, but also because my potential lady love must not see me hogging should she? This in my current opinion is such a stupid reason for not eating properly that I cannot believe that it was I who made that decision back then.

We reached the place and walked around checking out churches, stables, more churches, more stables, some cows which were not in the aforementioned stables, more stables with even more cows who were probably wondering as to the fate of the ones who were not in the stables with them. It was an extremely bovine trip.

During this time I was still pretty much behaving myself and not doing anything totally stupid. As the day progressed we decided to climb this series of hills.

These hills were fourteen in number and each had a small chapel on it. The final hill had a bigger chapel where it was said one could ask for three wishes and they would be granted. At this point I ask all of you, I was into this girl, I was in the 11th grade and had no previous girlfriend(s) to speak of, what do you think i would have wished for. I asked for world peace, an end to global warming, and the continued existence of mankind.....yes.....I did.

If someone yells out bullshit right now I stand guilty. I asked for the same thing thrice over.

"please let her be into me. please let something happen tween us" and so on. you get the drift..!!

The climb was spectacular and I did have some genuine fun. On the way back down I was throwing hints at her like a frikkin machine gun full of hints. It started raining pretty hard after that and we went to a pond or somethin..jus to wash our legs and that kinda thing.

The journey back home was sombre and I use this word since nothng else seems to fit the need here. My best buddy vysakh was sitting next to jennifer and i was elsewhere. This arrangement had come to be since we all rushed into the van since it was raining or something and in this rush we all just sat wherever we could. In my mind I was feeeling ok since I knew that as soon as we got settled in I could ask him to move and that he would. Imagine my surprise when I did ask him and he did not move just gave me an extremely weird smile and sat right there.

Due to his considerable bulk back then it was also impossible for me to move him in any way. So I sat there completely weirded out and really pissed off. Like a petulant and tantrum throwing child I kept on asking him again and again and every single time he did the same damn infuriating thing by smiling at me and not showing any inclination to relocate. On looking back I can see how childish of me this was and how irritating it would have been for him. However, in that moment I was angry enough to rip him apart if I could.

As we got on towards home we started the verbal sparring which was not much of a fair fight. I have this gift (or curse) where I can sharpen my words and their meanings to the point of them being like swords and arrows. I brushed aside his feeble words with contempt and threw my attacks onto him one after the other and watched with something sickeningly close to relish as they punched into and right through him. Eventually, he started crying and some semblance of sense came back to me. That was effectively the end of our friendship as I had known it and as I had cherished it. Even though we patched up after that things were never the same.

Whenever a friendship is established its almost like the trust built there is similar to an innocent child who knows nothing but to act as his/her heart dictates. Whenever something happens which causes a breach of the above trust its almost like the child loses his/her innocence and looks upon the world with grim eyes. This is probably what happened tween me and him.

The south africans left soon after. On the day that they left we hosts were hanging out with them at our schools head center. I took her aside and tried to talk to her but by then the absurdity of the whole thing had dawned on me and I realized that I did not want to say any of the things I had planned on saying and even if I had wanted to I would not have. The girl had a guy whom she liked back in south africa and the guy liked her too, and from all accounts he was a real nice sorta chap. Of all the things I am guilty of being, a douche who hits on commited girls is not one of them. So, our farewell was nice, I sang her a song with no other motive than to sing...and I knew that there were decent chances that I had gained a good friend.

I confess that it took a while before the jumble of feelings in my head could be completely sorted out and in that time I think I sent her like 20 e mails with no response to anything. Finally I got my head cleared up and continued to live my life. She did mail back eventually and we have carried on a correspondence ever since though just recently it died out. The reason for the correspondence dying was nothing other than the fact that our lives had grown too damn different that we could not talk about anything and make any sense to each other. I think I have already mentioned about this phenomenon in an earlier post, it is a sad facet of reality but an immutable one therefore we have to live with it.

One voice still cries out now and then asking a simple question "If she had been commited then why did she express an interest in me and that too not simply as a friend....". The answer to the above was either never created or is hidden beneath layers upon layers of societal programming that we have all received.

When I saw her off at the railway station I gave her one of my prized possessions, a parker fountain pen and i was rewarded with a smile and a hug. Then the train moved away. While the other hosts crowded around the door yelling inside and doing that kinda thing, I stood away from the train just looking at one of the shaded windows not even knowing if this was the one where they sat. The train left.

I got on a bus back home, it was raining, got back and resumed my normal school life. The guy who stayed with me turned out to be a total douche though and never once communicated with ANY of the hosts he had stayed with. Since I was the first one he stayed with I was the one who got all the gifts he brought for the host. These gifts involved a book with pictures of elephants (yea, like i needed another one of those) and a card or something thanking me and my family for hosting him. We still talk about the guy now and then and poke fun at his accent and stuff its not polite but its pure fun and in a minor and non harmful way, its payback.

This concludes the posts about the south africans.....so there..

Magus.

more on the prev post..

as you can see I have given up trying to find good titles for my posts this one just tells you what you are going to read in the following lines.

So when we last talked I had told you about how I had discovered that this girl called Jennifer had a thing for me. This news came to me via my best friend at that time Vysakh so I believed it completely. I later found out that while the girl had indeed said that she found me interesting that was pretty much all she said and all she meant but for the moment unaware of this truth I was happy. Come on, how many 11th grade guys (that too sitcom addicts) can resist the euphoria that comes with knowin that a girl (that too a cute one and well mannered) was into them.

So i kicked myself into idiot mode which is as follows. I become super clingy and super desperate and hyper possessive. The rib tickling fact here being that I was possessive over something which I in no way actually possessed (so I dont know if the technically correct word to use here is 'Craving' ). How she put up with it as long as she did is something which I will never understand, maybe she found in me something which was worth all the bullshit.

So while these guys were taken all around the town by the school authorities the respective hosts got to travel along with them which allowed me to spend a lot of time with them by which I mean with her. Another point to note here is that while their stated reason for the exchange trip was for cultural exchange and all that kinda hooey what they were actually doing was taking a goddamn holiday sponsored by their school. The guy Kreasen was actually goin out with one of the girls in the group (the one with the funniest name, Prindhavani...I mean....seriously...what is that, some kinda creeper or vine ? ) and so whenever they got a chance to be alone, they went at it like a pair of sex crazed monkeys (which on thinking about it, they actually were..so there..).

A few kids from my school, students from the fourth grade or so, saw these two smooching away like there was no tomorrow. This news spread like wildfire and soon everyone was talking about these libertines brazenly displaying their hedonistic tendencies (yea....800 in GRE verbal beeyach!! sorry). The school turned a deaf ear to this since they did not want an embarrassing exchange between themselves and the south african school. One can almost imagine the phone conversation (warning: dialogue section coming up)

my school: hey there

them: hello

us: theres been an incident

them: what kind of incident?

us: two of your students were caught kissing in the school.

them: kissing what?

us: kissing what????!!! why each other...what else could they be kissing?

them: trust us...you do not want to know..

(dark and threatening music in the background)

us:What is that music?

them: oh sorry..one moment, kids not here...band practice in the cow shed..the pig sty is temporarily the office remember? run along now.....yes, so where were we?

us: students...hmph..caught kissing...hmph..how should we deal with this?

them: well, you could take them to the chieftain of your village and he would see justice dispensed...this is what we would do

us: the village chief? right....(hangs up)

them: hello?....hello?.....(static comes through the line and the officer of the school starts to jot down corresponding morse code alphabets since this has been a long time hobby of his and he is glad that this indian school has decided to make the communication interesting..)

therefore, as I was saying, my school turned a deaf ear which was easy also since our office clerk was half deaf anyway, so we had one of those ready.

One day, these idiots and Jennifer, went on a trip to some resort kinda place, and this time around we hosts were not taken. I spent a boring day at school and learnt absolutely nothing at all which was an improvement over my average 11th standard day during which I would actually forget something and as a result come home more stupid than when I went to school in the morning. When they came back to the city and to the respective houses, Jennifer called me up and this is how it went.

Me: Hello?

Jennifer: Hello. It is amazing to hear your voice. I missed it.

Now, guys out there, tell me true, how awesome would that sound if it had happened to you. Suffice to say I was on cloud number 32564ASD, I had asked for cloud number 9 but that'd been reserved in advance by some guy called norbert who aced his basic algebra exam. I heard that he went on to become a dork.

Then one day, we were all to go to this hill station kinda place called Wagamon. During all the time that they were here and of all my interactions with her, this has been the strangest and worst. I shall recount it in full in the next post. By this point of time the guy Kreasen had moved out of my place and was living with this other guy who was a complete nut but he had some clout in the school since his mom was a teacher there (one of the nicest ladies out there btw).

We started out in the mornin and I had along with me my best buddy Vysakh and my current target, Jennifer and so I was as happy as possible. Things started going wrong pretty early and once they started going bad it was impossible to pull them back.

However, that tale is for the next post.

Magus.

South african invasion!!

Hey there..so this one is going to talk about the south africans who came to Cochin. This happened when I was in my 11th grade, in this school called Bharatiya Vidhya Bhavan close to my place. The school was part of this chain of schools all over the world, nice enough place. In our 11th grade we suddenly came to know that we had some kinda exchange program going on with this one school in a place called Chatsworth, in Durban South Africa. The teachers were asking around as to whether anyone would be interested in hosting some of these kids who were coming over.

Due to the unbelievable monotony of the 11th a few people were all for hosting 'some of these kids', including yours truly.

While initially we did not have enough hosts when the day came we had too many people vying for hosting these kids, until ultimately there was one of those market fights, in which there is like one onion left and this thin lady places her hand on it thinking to buy it. Just at that moment, this large beefy hand lands on her hand and it is connected to this large beefy lady who says in an extremely gruff and butch kind of voice "I saw it foist".

(for those of you folks who are trying to figure out what the words 'foist' means, try saying it a little faster than normal, and you will find that it sounds like the word 'first'....yea I know...amazing aint it?..do you also see the huge sign titled SARCASM glowing on my head....? you do?...good...money well spent)

Then the thin lady retorts in an extremely thin and screechy kind of voice "I laid my hand on it first"

for the sake of convenience lets call the thin one olive, and the fat one bluto.

Bluto: So why dont you remove your hand from it first?

Olive: i cant.

Bluto: Why not?

Olive: Theres a slab of granite placed on it.

Bluto: A slab of....oh wait...OH ARE YOU CALLING MY HAND A SLAB OF GRANITE?

Olive: Your hand? Oh no, I was just referring to your fingers alone.

Bluto: Why you....(BIFF)

Olive:(Dodge and BAM!!)

the combat begins....you can almost visualize this old chinese sorcerer dude sitting in this raised throne kinda thing, waiting for the fight to end, and then saying to the victor "FINISH HIM/HER". Weird how I had to make him a politically correct sorcerer.

well, the struggle to get the chance to host these exchange students was akin to the above. It did get kinda dirty with a few people even goin so far as to discredit the others.

At the end of it all, I was selected along with a few others to be the hosts.

There were four girls and one guy (yea, love the ratio..). They were given frikkin VIP treatment from the very first and it was super weird for us. There were a lot of the kids who did not know better than to stare at them when they walked around in school which only served to increase their opinion of themselves.

The guy who was staying at my place was named Kreasen Naidoo of which the Indian equivalent is Krishnan Naidu. Oh, did I forget to mention that these kids were not south africans as in true south africans, they were the kids of Indians who had migrated to SA long back. One thing which I have found out is that Indian kids growing up anywhere other than in India stand a good chance of getting really really messed up. There is a weird kind of fusion of cultures which leaves in its wake an abomination in place of any cultural identity.

However to be honest this guy was not all that bad, we got along well, he gelled kinda good with my family too. It was an interesting time.

Now comes the real interesting stuff. So like I said there were four girls along with them. While two of these girls , Prindhavani and Indrani stayed along with this one classmate of mine called Vaani. The other two, Melissa and Jennifer stayed along with this other classmate named Anjali.

Now, my best bud during those days was this guy called Vysakh, and one day while he was hanging out with Anjali, Melissa and Jennifer. The topic of crushes came up and guess whos name Jennifer mentioned. Yea, my name. I had talked to her a few times, sung for them not a few times, and generally hung out with them a lot. I had noticed her to be a well brought up, kind, sensitive and decent girl which was saying a lot. To top it all off she was quite beautiful.

So what did I say?

"No, I hardly know her, and shes leaving in a few days, there cannot possibly be anything here"

yea, thats what I should have said.

This is what my actual reply went like

"WHOOOOPPPPPPPPPPPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...."

so yea, thats it for this post, more about this on the next one.. on hindsight, this post was not as interesting as I thought it would be, but anyway, I had wanted to record all of this for quite some time now, I guess this is as good a chance as any,

magus.

the terrible trio(part 3)

so here it is, the pre penultimate part in this series of posts (hopefully!!)..truth is I cannot stick to a topic..once I start writing I quickly lose direction of where I am going. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing since travelers often find new and interesting paths when they are well and truly lost.
Entrance coaching went on in the previously described fashion which is only funny in hind sight. After each class I felt more and more like some soldier in a damn trench somewhere, with each passing second my ammo went lower and lower, my comrades fell around me (yea...this didnt happen..except for that one kid who fell down the stairs while contemplating the answer to a particularly tough question...wonder what happened to him....M.Knight Shyamalan...heres a nice idea for a new movie dude...you can call it..."THE KID WHO FELL DOWN THE STAIRS WHILE THINKING ABOUT A PROBLEM"....well as far as titles go that one is not particularly great but then again who the hell cares..!!). My friendship with simon went on and became something which would weather the tests of time. The other guy Arvind though a good friend of mine initially went on and did something which though not terribly wrong, was a backstab none the less, and things were never the same between us. Thinkin back, it was all so damn childish, I had a crush on this one girl from school, and so did he though I did not know this. I went and asked him for advice on how to get something goin with her, since I considered him to be inifinitely more knowledgeable in these areas. He adviced me to do a number of things which I did (nothing evil, dont jump to conclusions...) and these steps did nothing but make the girl convinced that I was a dangerous person (a stalker even...LOL....Me!!a stalker!!). One day I came to know that in a discussion between Simon and Arvind, Arvind had told Simon "and Nikhil Varma still thinks I'm helping him".
I really hope that at least a few of you out there realize the venom in these words. Though he might not have meant there to be so much venom in them. Who knows? The girl however turned out to be a first rate tramp (No, this is not a case of the unreachable grapes being sour...Arvind will confirm this for you..). I do not hold any anger towards him, and still actually think that he is a real cool person. However, after this whole series of incidents..somehow...we never managed to get back to where we were.
Simon was always the neutral zen kinda guy. The sort of person who has a flaming meteor crash land next to him and he goes "oh darn..!! now my clothes are all sooty..". As to how many peopled have had meteors crash land next to them, I do not know. I did read in the paper about this german kid who had a meteorite crash right into his hand. The small piece of flaming rock hit him on the hand, twirled him about, and threw him onto the road and it crashed right into the ground still powerful enough to dig deep down and leave a damn near crater. The kid survived and is not injured too bad as far as I know. Now thats luck is it not?
Another thing that happened when I was going to entrance classes. During a period of time I was so sick and tired of the things happening that I decided to skip classes for a few days. Now, our sir had this brilliant policy of asking for leave letters from people who took a day off. He was extremely particular when it came to this. Sometimes I think that he knew that some of us were likely to just bail out and he didnt want the parents to be oblivious to this. So I had not told my mom about me not going to classes for a few days. I took the bus to the city where the classes were held, and then I would get down walk to the homeward bus stop, board a bus and come right back home. I always had a nice excuse for my mom and even went so far as to say that the sir had some medical problem (im not proud of this). Everytime he asked me for the leave letter I would say, "Sir, tomorrow". Finally we had a test coming up and on the day of the test, sir told me that he would not let me take it unless I brought him the letters. The game was up!! I had been caught.
I went home shame faced and told my mom the whole thing. She was fine with it and did not lose her temper. yeah right!! dude, mount frikkin Vesuvius would have cowered in fear had it been able to hear my mom yelling that day. i was more ashamed than afraid. So I told her "mom, just give me the letter, I wont repeat this". but, no, god had other plans for me.
Mom:Tell you what, Nikhil(names have been changed to protect the readers from horror!!). I am coming to the class with you. I want to meet the sir and talk about what is wrong with you.
Me: maa, please dont...I said im sorry.
Mom: too garbled, at this point she was sounding like something between an extremely pissed wolverine (no, not the X men character, im talking about the animal) and a banshee (female spectre which screams real loud). I could not make much out other than words like "disappointment" "failure" "doomed forever" "eternal damnation" and so on.....yea.....she just loved me that day!!

she did come with me to meet the sir, and even went ahead and listed out the various excuses I had laid out in font of her.

Mom: Sir, he even said you were sick.
Sir: (has a sly grin on his face, but then quickly resumes normal stern expression...)
Me: (trying very hard to sink into the ground..)
Mom: Sir, what should I do.
Sir: He has to be more focussed otherwise BIG DISASTER. (I capitalise that last part because thats exactly the way the sir said it. If anyone has ever come up with verbal capitalization, then its him)
Me: hey guys..anyone seen the new matrix movie? (lousy attempt to change the subject)

at this point my mom stares at me using one of her ultimate moves, the medusa's gaze....I have been turned to stone..!! (not to be confused with, I have become stoned!! think weed....not stones hurtling through the air.)

after that ordeal i swore to never again lie to my mom which lasted for another day or so..!! but I try to be as true as possible..and never do I lie serious lies..so I am a liar with a conscience which makes me a nice human being I should think...

after I was not able to make it through the IIT screening test, I lost hope and quit the entrance the classes, which was a big mistake since this led to me messing up my remaining entrances as well. The days I spent there will live with me forever, and even now I remain in awe of the sir. I had visited him just before I left to the US, I wanted to inform him of my good turn of events, and I was really happy when he was genuinely pleased to hear from me.
We sat facing each other, and he finally had a look on his face which said "Well done Nikhil. Not as good as I had seen for you, but well done none the less".
For my part I just want to tell him "thank you sir, for seeing in me more than I ever saw in myself..".

that brings this post to an end, I know it was not as funny as the previous one..but then again Im jus typing things like I feel....freestyle baby!!
on the next one I really will talk to you about the coming of the south africans..!!its a great story..funny at times, weird most of the time...but its definitely something to read..

later..

Magus.

the terrible trio(part 2)

so..when we conversed last time I was telling you about the entrance coaching I used to go in my eleventh standard. My 11th grade was horrid, I did not do any good on my academics except on computer science (D-uh!!). part of the reason for this was due to the all powerful sense of lethargy which had taken over once the tenth grade concluded. I felt like a HUGE race had been run and that no more such races would be happening in the near future.
Classes drifted by and were only moderately difficult, and on the other side I was going to entrance classes which were super super tough, weird kind of situation there. I would shift down my mental gears and chill in class, only to rush off to the entrance class and be like..."whaaaa...". Some of the times, I felt so dumb, I swear I could hear myself go "Ogg not understand....Ogg CRUSH!!". For those of you who did not understand the previous reference, think of this caveman kinda guy, standing there with a club in one hand and scratching his shaggy head with the other hand, and having this extremely stupid yet perplexed expression on his face. This is Ogg, everyone say hi.

Everyone: Hi Ogg...!!

Ogg:....umm.....err...glurp!!

Everyone: How cute!!!!

Ogg:..Ogg SMASH!!

Internet addicted teenage girl: Oh wow, lol, he is so cute, hey Ogg, ASL?.....lol, lol....rotfl...nasa..icbm...lol...lol...nato..!!

Ogg: (walks over to said girl and smashes her into the ground....the world both past, present and future heaves a HUGE sigh of relief...if only there were more Oggs out there..).

So, some of us used to do this thing, like an avoidance tactic, we would sit at the back of the class so that the sir would not pick on us. One wonders why such a sophisticated and well thought out plan did not work (heavy sarcasm there..FYI). To the ones who sat at the back, the sir would devote a few minutes of his time during which he would embarrass and shame everyone into moving to the front. So here I am in the midst of all this, and I thought 'ok, so he picks on the ones in the back, If i sit in the middle I should be ok..right? right?' there was no reply since I dont reply to me often (think 'A Beautiful Mind'..).
Therefore, confident in the brilliance of my plan I sat in the middle, lo and behold he got me again.
'Nikhil Varma, good that you are moving forward in the class. Come sit here in the front row, yes right there..no, dont create a new row behind the front....sit in the front row...yes..good..now whats the answer?'.
Fellow Student: "sir, hes fainted".
Sir: "No, no, he is thinking hard, let us give him sometime and move on."
(who would have thought that entrance coaching sirs an bears would have the same thinking tendency, play dead and you're good to go..)

Also, this sir had a thing where he would make any guys name sound like the most important coupla words in the world. For instance when he called out my name, "NIKHIL VARMA", one almost expected the rest to come out something like "you are the only hope for the world, the force is strong in you" or something like that. Or maybe even "the challenger for the title of world heavy weight.." (no, not wrestling, body weight....!!).

Life went on in such a fashion, which is only funny when viewed in hindsight (kinda like our asses!! ha ha ha....sorry, couldn't resist that one..). There were so many incidents like this one where Arvind came into class wearing half pants and the sir got on his case, or the time when he caught us exchanging cds. He wanted us to be serious and focused, I was not. I wish I had taken his advice, but then again, this is my story and this is how it goes.

In the next post I shall talk about the coming of the south africans...yes, you heard that right. Stay tuned..or signed in, or whatever.....what?? you want me to use more technical terms? Do you want me to call Ogg and ask him to tend to you?...
I am getting stupid....
you are making me really stupid....you would not like me when I am stupid.!!

aawwrrr.....glurp..........blaurrrr!!....zzzzz....snore....zzzz

Ogg aka Magus aka Wraith aka moi!!

the terrible trio (part 1)

scary kinda name isn't it? Well, the actual story is hardly worthy of the title but like I have mentioned before, I am horrid at giving titles to my blog posts. So there..!!

After my 10th grade, and my decent performance, came the vacations before the 11th standard's commencement. This was a blissfull time, the only thing cooler than vacation is going on vacation with the knowledge that you kicked ass in the exams. The family went to our favortie getaway, Goa. First however we stopped for praying at the Mookambika temple in Karnataka. After this we drove to Goa and it was as beautiful as ever. The beaches are great and so is the food, and there is so much to choose from. I am sure that if you find just the right place they might even offer to serve to you the loch ness kebab made from....yes...you guessed correctly a local vegetable called hness from a plant called the loc plant which grows only in the line of control (Mega ouch..!! that attempt at humor was so horrible that I just got a call from down below telling me that this single joke had offset all my good deeds till now....DRAT!!). My family and meself, we had always really enjoyed Goa, the place has this relaxing aura about it which affects everyone. Even for a master of the uptightness school like me it is impossible not to chill.

After spending a few glorious weeks in Goa we headed back, me still basking in the glow of my academic exploits, my mom basking in the glow of her slave driving skills, my dad basking...well he was pretty much focused on driving (which is good..) and my brother, much younger at that time, calling out "Veerappan.....Veerappan....." even though we had expressly asked him not to do so. We were travelling through a ghat area and it had been known to harbor brigands of whom the aforementioned and now deceased Veerappan had been the leader. In short the drive back home was good.

Eleventh standard was interesting mostly due to my inner turmoil. I never had , didnt and most probably wont ever consider myself an intelligent student, and I knew for a fact that I was not at all hardworking, in fact I was one of the laziest out there (Not a few times have I been likened to a sloth..). Keeping the above deficiencies in mind I had no clue as to how I had scored the marks I scored in the tenth, but I was determined to duplicate the feat since it seemed to keep everyone happy. Well.....almost everyone, the kids who had been scoring good marks until then looked at me with venom in their eyes and I could almost hear their thoughts going 'He does not put in a tenth of the work we put in yet how did he do this? Could our calculations have been wrong?' and so on. It was funny to have 'foiled' their plans (and kinda satisfying).

I did not do anything wrong in particular it was more like an inevitable occurrence. About which I shall speak in a bit, first I feel I ought to justify the title of this post. I joined for entrance coachin in my eleventh standard. It was this one institute called Talent Sindia which I joined finally (I say finally because I had tried two other places before this, both of these quite interesting stories in themselves but for a later time..). At Talent sindia I ran into this one guy called simon, and this one other guy called Arvind (there was a fourth dude, who kinda vanished after two years and never really came back into the picture). I got along famously with these guys, they were similar in attitude and the presence of an all encompassing confusion as to what in the nine hells they were doing going to classes for entrance exams. Our classes used to get over at around 745PM and then we would all walk towards the spot from where we could catch the buses back home. Simon and Arvind would go in one direction and me and the other guy, Arjun would go in the other. It was so nice, walking and talking with them after a class which none of us really understood but had to pretend to have comprehended to the utmost extent since anything less and the sir would visit his divine wrath upon us by way of mocking us in front of all the others.

This sir is one of the few people whom I respect to the maximum extent possible and I shall always want to impress him since it would only be something worthwhile which could do so. Along with his amazing knowledge and communication skills he also had the word fighting skills of a champion. Using not a single obscenity (kinda obvious since hes a sir) and not even once getting angry, he could decimate any persons verbal responses or even queries in a few cases. And for all the others in the class it would be impossible not to laugh at the poor bloke who is being subjected to this verbal onslaught. More about the sir later.

The four of us became fast friends, not of the usual sort with a lot of heart warming activities, and standing together hands clasped heroically as some smooth and encouraging song plays in the background. No, we were quite different from the Hollywood definition of friends, we were more like soldiers hunkered down together in the same trench under heavy enemy fire. We either lost or never had a sergeant who could have directed us so in addition to being scared crapless we were lost without a hope. People under these circumstances develop a kinship which is uncommon in strength and resilience. Just the other day I met Simon, and even though we rarely hang out or even chat, we were able to spend an enjoyable time together. And just like soldiers, veterans who get together, we revisited the times we had spent.

More in this stream in part 2....

if anyone is reading this, hope ur havin fun...

for the others...well theres really no point in me tellin you nethin is there?

Magus.

nostalgia..

Nostalgia's a weird thing dont you think? I mean we hear so many proverbs and other wise sayings to the effect of "Go forward, dont look back" and yet when we do turn around and take a few glances what we see always makes us feel.....well....for lack of a better word, weird. Just the other day I was talking to this one acquaintance of mine from back in the day (wow, i always wanted to use that expression 'back in the day'. makes me feel like an ol' timer...yee haw!! crap..i think I really miss Florida...) and it was real nice.

I use nice to sum up the conversation since it defines the overall nature of the way things went. Was it completely smooth? Well, mostly, but there were a few points at which I was like "oh kay..what to say now?..how bout 'hey did you hear bout that dude who got his new console? It is sweeeeet!!' or ' zen has always held a dear place in my mind. What about you?' or 'eehh.....whats up doc?' see, by now I am totally clutching at straws.. (The straws make a mysterious appearance yet again..coincidence or conspiracy..stay tuned to find out....for those of you heretics who dont read my blog, the straws were mentioned in the last post, hence the terribly funny joke in the previous line..). However, heres the funny thing, anytime this came up, instantly some recollection wandered into the conversation and it instantly became a jaunt down memory super highway (yea, I decided to call it super highway instead of memory lane, so sue me..)

It was really nice to talk about so many things that happened back then. When we were younger we had a totally fresh and uncomplicated way of looking at things and even though this might not have been the most efficient thing to do, it was certainly fun. Its like, when you come home from school all tired and stuff and all you have to worry about is whether you are going to play that new game you installed on the pc or watch that new show about mutant mice riding on harleys (the mice are from mars by the way.....why are they from mars? ask the fox network...i have no clue). Looking back I can sense an inherent simplicity in those acts which is lost on everything I do these days.

Maybe it is the natural order of things simple first complex later and then simple again and then completely absent. One might notice that I have likened the complexity of the events to the stages of man.

It was nice catching up with this one person, and I intend to keep the contact alive as far as I can.

As far as all other things are concerned I am havin a nice time back home, learning a lot of web development related stuff and also been messing around with a few music ideas.

If someone came and asked me whether I have any idea as to where I am headed, I would stare blankly at him and then shake my head with no expression on my face. I have not the slightest inkling of an idea as to where im going but maybe most people dont either. Maybe its the ones who are so sure of their path that are the most conflicted inside. This is merely speculation not expressed desire, I would not wish conflict on anyone.

Magus.

advertising

I have been back home for about two weeks now, and really wanted to blog (scream!!) about the plight of the advertising industry here. I have no clue about the nature of the so called advertising executives. The final straw came today (along with the penultimate straw and a whole lot of other straws, it seems to be some kind of straw migration...hyok!!). I saw an advertisement for a seemingly revolutionary kinda toothbrush. Now, there comes to my mind umpteen ideas about how this could be presented properly and efficiently( and of course attractively). The advertising folks here however, came up with this gem of an idea. They showed two toothbrushes, one male and another female talkin about their son, the revolutionary new toothbrush. Now this idea, in its original form is not bad, some real cool things could be done with it. However they decided to do the whole thing where, the parents are talking about how their son can clean germs out of teeth much better and about how his bristles are longer and so on. I am not sure, due to my hindi being rusty at best, but at one point im fairly certain that one parent said to the other "he gets those bristles from you my dear". I mean, oh my dear gods above...what is the world coming to.
Wouldn't it be funny if the same toothbrush family was painted in a different light, for instance, an american light. The toothbrush dad is a drunk and that too an abusive drunk. The toothbrush mom is an exotic dancer and she is the one who makes ends meet. The toothbrush son is a renegade who after extracting the germs from teeth seels them on the green market (green symbolizing germs and stuff like that...what was that? lame joke? oh no...I am being judged...ahh...me scared...me no write long time...ahh go shove it..my blog my path..). Would that not be an interesting alternative to the story that our ad execs came up with. I do however understand why they cannot show such events on public TV.
Advertising as such is sinking with respect to the intelligence that goes into the creation of such ads. However this does not mean that the effectiveness of the ads are going down, since the population in general is becoming dumber by the day, these moronic ads seem to hit the spot.
Do not even get me started on the hindi soaps. I intend to do a huge blog post about that one of these days, gonna collect some pictures from the net and so on, might be fun.

otherwise, am havin a nice time at home. Feels good to revert back to being me.

Magus.

concernin stupidity

Have you ever been in a situation where you could actually feel yourself getting dumber? What was that? College lectures? Oh you aint seen nothin yet.

Stupidity in its lower levels is an innocent and mostly harmless trait, and also quite amusing when observed in another person. When it graduates to the higher levels though one must be wary when dealing with masters of stupidity. These people can destroy your brain using simple attacks.

For instance, after coming to the US I realized that the majority of people here are stupid masters. Especially the female populace. When one waits at the bus stops or malls one can sense snippets of their power through their conversation. They talk about such irrelevant and asinine matters that you can actually see the following scenario unfold in your head.

A vast battlefield, thousands of neurons kneeling down (for the moment assume that I am anthropomorphing the neurons.....what was that? I cant do that? Oh ok, im sorry , I wont....oh wait, this is my blog so you can go shove ur opinion..). These brave warriors each hold a small wakisashi ready to slice their innards out. The neuron in the lead screams out "We cannot stand this anymore, the stupidity in this conversation has defeated us. We have let our master  and clan down, we must commit seppuku"....and then they all kill themselves. What just happened? You became more stupid. Congratulations, you are one step closer to getting your US citizenship.

The one reason why this country got where it is right now is due to the various immigrants who have toiled away for it at one point of time or another. These immigrants include the original irish, the japanese, the chinese and then us, the indians. Not to mention the jews, germans, russians and all the other races. Put together thats a massive amount of brainpower, more than enough to mask this country's inherent stupidity.

There is something I think about though whenever I see one of these stupid masters, or another term would be aeropostale zombie. Or abercrombe and fitch zombie, GAP zombie, and so on.

What goes on inside their heads. Are they simply following the idea that ignorance is bliss and therefore not trying to open their eyes to the world since they know that actually knowing the state of things is going to be horrid.

Well, something to think about I suppose.

latero,

Magus.

losing..

yea another dark post...boo hoo...shove it...i dont care no more...

my classes are over and right now I dont really have anything to do throughout the day. Therefore i sit here lost inside myself. Thats a song from staind, at least part of a song, the lyric goes

"and i sit here, lost inside myself,

remembering all the things you said,

the silence, gets us nowhere

gets us nowhere, way too fast"

i've always loved staind for their amazing expressiveness. Their songs actually mean something more than the typical emo bullshit about some girl dumping some guy. I mean how many times can you tolerate listenin to someone moan about somethin which happened. I am being a hypocrite when I say this because I complain a lot about the things that happened to me.

Of course In mycase I dont complain to anyone in particular since no one listens, i talk to my walls instead. I was talkin to my best friend In india the other day, and I was telling him "dude, i think my walls are about to walk out on me, they have heard enough whining"....he laughed, so did I.

Laughing is important, it doesnt matter how you do it, if you can do it that means you can still be saved. As long as you can find something or the other to make you smile, then that means the next day is still worth living for.

Of course some relationships are doomed to fail even as they start. This is an inevitability. Friendships fading out and so on. I had this one friend back in college and we used to be quite close, I liked him for his honesty and simplicity, and heaven knows why he liked me. We got along famously untill one time, there was this one competition for which we had registered as a team. He had asked me whether I could make it, and I had said yes. At the last moment my laziness engine kicked in somethin fierce and I called him and said I would not be coming. This was followed by more cheapness on my part as I asked him to return the money I had invested in the travel arrangements. For about a year he did not talk to me, but then slowly we started talking again and even became slightly better as far as the friendship thing was concerned. However, it was never the same.

And now I do not even have any contact with him.

The same story goes for so many people, you meet them once and both parties feel like there might be something in continuing the communication. We find out more about each other and so on. If you are lucky this goes on, if not, this fades away. Eventually we all come to that point where watching that new sitcom or reading that novel is more important than asking a friend "how was your day?". It is something essentially human I suppose.

Is every act we do motivated by greed in someway or the other? I wonder about this.

Today, this one friend of mine called me up and asked me whether I could help this other friend of hers move a table into her apt. I said yes and went over to that apt and helped this girl move the table in after which I left. She was not very thankful which irked me not a little. I had walked over to her apt in the hot sun and moved a table in, i didnt know her, and didnt even know the girl who had called me that well. Why did I do it then? Why did I agree to help?

Because I am a good guy at heart? hell no. If I was then I would not even be irked at having received no thanks from her. Thus I think that at some subconscious level my motive was another, less idealistic one.

On a positive note, there was this one friend I have been exchanging emails with for a while. When she got into a relationship, I did the decent thing and backed off so as to not take her time since I know how time consuming such things are. Recently she mailed me again, and we are once again talking. This felt good. I guess it can be likened to the single ray of sunshine that filters in amidst all the darkness.

Life is sad now.

I am constantly depressed.

later.

Wraith.

The true damage

We rarely know the true extent of the damage we have done to ourselves. In most cases we 'move on' after the incident unaware that the incident's aftereffects still pursue us. Sometimes the only way in which you can move on is by telling yourself that everything is ok, by which we are actually lying to ourselves. Take affairs of the heart for instance, how can things be ok? Every aspect of our day to day life is driven by our self, which in turn is regulated by our emotional wellness, and if some incident has occurred which blows said emotional wellness out of the window, then how can things be ok?

They are not.

In the words of my best friend, "There is a hole in my chest, and I cannot fill it, only ignore it and hope that this works".

This works in the sense that most of your usual activities return to normal, and you are functioning as people around you expect you to function. However, the true extent of the damage, the scars become visible only when we are by ourselves.

I took a look inside myself recently and was scared by what I saw inside, or rather the absence of what I expected to see. A huge part of me has become reduced to nothing, there is simply a void there, and the infection spreads. 

The story which comes to mind is as follows. The child who is confronted by his worst nightmare keeps on rocking back and forth, hugging his knees to his chest, whispering over and over again "you are not real, you are not real, this is not real,,,this cannot be real".... does that make his ordeal any less real than any other element of reality.

The reason for my state is far away from me, but I do have means of contact. One sided contact. The messages are never returned. There is only maddening silence.

The psychological concept of closure after some nerve wracking event, is so important, and the problem with the so called "clean cut" is that it offers no closure.

The "clean cut" concept is the one which says that the only way to take care of a life threatening problem is to cut it off immediately at the source, no questions asked, no goodbyes said, nothing. There is only the swiftness of the blade as it descends, whistling through the air, delivering sweet and terrible release.

I might never be ok without the closure I require, yet there is nothing I can do about this. 

Today I sat here thinking about band practice later, and I thought about taking a break in between practice and coming out of the warehouse and calling someone to talk to. Thats  when it struck me, I had no one to call. Not a single person.

How frightening is that? 

I guess I am probably going to come outside and stare at the stars or something.

damn it all...

wraith.

wind mage..

you can just tell from the title that this is gonna be a weird one right? yeah you can...

I'm gonna tell you bout somethin I do now and then. When I'm walking down an open kinda street or somethin, I just spread my arms out to either side like im about to fly, and the wind just picks up, swirling all around me, feels amazing. Heres the funny part though, if your imagination is strong enough you can make it such that you are the one summoning the wind and making it fly here and there. This is not akin to the other forms of magic, since those mostly require a master-slave approach, with the wind however, the caster and the wind are associates. There are no commands, only requests.

I've always told anyone who was interested in listening that of all the elements, the wind was my favorite. Somethin about the freedom inherent in the wind just calls out to me. At the end of a hard day, I've found myself wishing so many times that I could just transform into one of the many winds and just fly about for a while. High over the lands, where no one can see me, and no one can judge me. 

Another thing I love about the wind is the way in which it plays with my hair. One of the reasons why I like having long hair is because, it looks so cool when its being swept about by the wind. Therefore in order to have long hair which sweeps about I make a sacrifice on the overall quality of my appearance, meaning, I go out looking like a caveman.

The seaside is amazing in that respect, it is so windy and the sound of the waves crashing on the shore is so cool. Mountains are even better, not the real cold ones, im talking more like, the grassy meadows kinda mountains. There was this one show on cartoon network a long time back, and I've seen it in passing, it was called heidi, and even though the show was essentially queer  the setting was amazing, it was set somewhere in the swiss alps. Now that I think about it, there might have been a geographical inaccuracy there, since as far as I know the alps are snow clad most of the time, and in this toon they showed the mountains as being full of grassy meadows and the like. My word, they looked amazing.

Another comic which I was crazy bout was Asterix, I loved the adventure the humour and the setting. For a while in my childhood I think I actually started a search for gaul so that I could relocate there, I mean come on...even the barbarians looked friendly and as long as you knew a druid you would be ok. Everything about that comic was cool, the camraderie it portrayed, the simple life versus so many complications brought in by the romans. I appreciated greatly the way in which the authors had addressed so many serious issue by means of something so funny and innocent. I never get sick of reading Asterix, irrespective of how many times.

thats it for now dudes,

magus.

a funny lil person

yea, this ones gonna be about one of the funniest people I know..shes this friend of mine from UF..and shes pretty diminutive..

I always have a lot of fun talking to her, because she is so darn funny and isn't even aware of it..plus some of the jokes I try to crack, they may be as obvious as daylight, but she still wont get them..and ends up with this perplexed expression on her face...which is so darn funny and cute..

Today, i was talkin to her in the mornin, and this was our first meeting after some time...and apparently she has picked up a few new quirks..

during the course of our conversation in the lab, I heard her talking "Oh, this guy....wont let me go" or something similar...i was wondering who she was referring to.....and thats when I found out that she was in fact referring to the computer as, "this guy"...my immediate response was "You've been alone for quite some time haven't you?"... this got funnier since, we have this thing in our lab where if you have exceeded your profile storage then the system wont let you log off until you have cleared the excess memory...and the program which checks for this is one of the wonders of the cyber world.. i dont believe it is possible to ever again come up with a piece of code that is so retarded...hmm, however, hold that thought...im getting better at screwing up every day, so I cant say that for sure...i might just end up writing something which is even worse.

The one word which popped into my head when she said this was, anthropomorphic.. darn GRE vocab wont leave my skull..

so life went on in the lab..until I heard her come out with this one exclamation which made me go like "Whoop!!" the whoop being a sound indicating a sudden stop, or mebbe "Screech!!" like a speeding car whose driver stomps on the brakes just before a zebra crossing or somethin like that...

She actually asked the computer, "What is your problem in/with life?"...

at first I thought that she had in fact flipped her lid, and was enquiring about the computer's failed dreams in earnest.. but then I realized that the PC was not letting her take a few prints, and this was her retaliatory remark..

My first response to her, or maybe this was in my head, "Seriously?"....

and then when I asked her as to the source of her extremely interesting verbal talents, she refused to divulge any further information....I wish I knew where she got these from...

cause If I knew, then I would go to that place stand around all day, and listen to people talk, and laugh until I burst apart at the seams...hey, it can happen..

but once again, darn it all, sometimes she can be so funny without even knowing it, which is basically why I like spending time with her...that and the fact that shes an all around cool person...

yea thats about it..

hey why isnt the minimize working?

darn it....work!! work!!

"what is your problem with life huh? What?"

LOL!!

 magus..