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!!