The Angel

Make friends with the angels, who though invisible are always with you. Often invoke them, constantly praise them, and make good use of their help and assistance in all your temporal and spiritual affairs. - Francis De Sales, St.

Did I say I'd be busy for some time? Well, I forgot about the Diwali weekend, it seems. :-)

As I sit to blog again, this time to write about Chelsea football club, the Angel on the wall catches my attention (yes, I CAN see it!). I think I shall write a short note of appreciation for the Angel instead, who selflessly stood by me through those hours of agony, held my hand and walked me out of the creepy maze I had gotten into. (held my hand metaphorically of course, NOT literally)

The events took place a coupla months back, at the height of the flood situation. As the flood raged down the adjacent river, the Insects Confederation of the area declared an emergency baithak. Their boss announced, "We won't be able to live here for much longer, our homes are going to get flooded. Let's shift from here to Morpheus' house on the 7th floor. I heard from a source that he's terribly scared of us. With numbers on our side, we might even be able to scare Morpheus out of his home and keep his apartment all for ourselves."

And thus began the exodus. As the river level slowly arose, tens of hundreds of creepy crawlies marched up the wall into my apartment. I was petrified! I bought and sprayed one can of insect killers after another, but to no avail. I couldn't eat, walk, sit, or even bathe in peace. I would keep the windows and doors fastened, but still they'd come in from some nook or cranny. For a moment, I did contemplate running away from the apartment, but that's when the Angels came and rescued me out of my misery and predicament.

Like silent warriors, these angels took on the insects, and crushed their resistance. With Hitlerish sureness, they sniffed out every single insect, devoured them, and wiped their sorry asses away for good. Today my room is back to being just like it used to be in the days of yore - a tad (tad?) dirty, but completely insect free. :-)

Dear Angel and all your angel pals, I can't give you a hug, but I really owe you one...

Neo Speaketh

Couldn't resist myself to get heard in the deluge of posts by Morpheus. Looks like the downpour on Southern India has gathered its contents from the bright crevices in the Bong's cranium. Even Playboy's yearly calendars will be bedazzled with the versatility and "openness" of the contents this blog page has been hosting in recent times.

My feline obsession is pre-ordained to be not long lived. Will be getting on the joy-ride in a short while. I thank the visitors on this page to have held the perseverance and patient to digest what we post. Like Morph, I am also wondering whether we are the only ones who read our stuff. Hoping somebody will shine a Morse Code form the nearby Andromeda neighborhood declaring their acknowledgement of these chronicles of representative Homo Sapiens from the lands of Bharat-varsh. For the rest of the earthlings, keep reading and as Steve Jobs would have said "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Aloha!!

Neo seems to be caught up at the crossroads of his career and with a certain feline obsession ;), so he hasn't been posting for some time. Or perhaps, I've been posting too often, I dunno. As I glance through the 'edit posts' page, I notice that an opposite trend took place some months back - when Neo had a dozen posts back to back, and I was completely out of the radar. Well, I'd be taking a mini break myself and though I'll try to post sometimes, I really can't say how far I'll be successful.

I thought I'd damaged something in my left hamstring area, I hobbled back from the jog early today and couldn't move the darn leg. Had to stay indoors, and took up some catfights on Orkut. And then I slept for the rest of the day, all the way till midnight. Now I'm awake like an Owl at 2.18 AM, and as I can see, only some miracle or divine conjuration can get me to fall asleep again anytime soon.

Staying up all night means that I'll be feeling groggy throughout the day tomorrow. Damn! *&@#()((*@#**;$*@#$&

Oh and by the way, the legs fine. All those who check our blog (I have a hunch sometimes that Neo and me are the only readers of our blog :-) ) please come back from time to time, and read old posts. :-P

Hastalavista for the moment.

The muteness of the environment was broken by the pyrrhic verses of the battling arthropods. The underdog seemed half dead, and his much swifter and stronger nemesis was striking him with regular and near fatal precision. He was a spent force physically, but his will power flickered on. Against all odds, he chalked a momentous resurgence to sum up his little muscles to prepare for one final strike at the behemoth enemy.

*shmack*

If the bodily impact of this strike didn't overwhelm the behemoth, the shock and awe of it surely did. While he was happily beating the crap out of the half dead underdog, not once did the unimaginable thought of the beaten crip arising back from his half-death cross his mind. And as the shocked behemoth increasingly found himself being dragged into the tempest of his imminent ill-fate, the underdog crip's adrenalin inspired him to gather his energies for yet another strike.

*paff*

Knock out. The behemoth fell flat on his nose, never to rise again. A pyrrhic victory for the little one.

However, I must admit, I couldn't exactly admire the idea of two creepy insects engaging in warfare 2 feet away from me. Neither did I feel like swatting them/it with my textbook. So I pushed them away from the round terra firma structure I was sitting on outside the Nandan, and got myself a cup of chai. After the momentary diversion of the insect fight, my mind wandered back to the labyrinth it was in.

The world turned mute once again, and I couldnt hear or feel anything. That moment, the chai didnt have a taste, the cute tushy of the girl standing in front didn't light up a braincell, the red buses that moved around seemed like large grey bricks moving haphazardly around my eyeballs, the hustling pedestrians turned into a grey hazy nebula...

Shuttling between blur and focus, my mind touched the next focus after 5 minutes with the gonging of the shrill cellphone ringtone. The caller ID didn't have that familiar number. I shut it. I covered my somewhat-watery eyes with my hands, and lamented 'oh crap, I screwed up'.

The SaMoSa factory

A couple of days back, I went to this coffee shoppee. I'm not a great coffee aficionado, but the place has a HUGE plasma television which almost invariably always plays a sports channel. So that's the best incentive. While catching up on a World Cup Qualifier game, our inconsequential discourses turned to SMSes. While we were discussing nuances of how much time people have on their hands (heh! look who's talking) to be inspired enough to write and forward all those silly SMSes and the grave proportions of this psychological addiction, the bloke who was sipping his kenyan coffee at the table to the left joined in our convo. (I made out that the coffee was Kenyan since they serve it in mugs that are 2.5 times larger than the usual ones)

Claiming to be an ex-copywriter for a private advertising firm, that didn't actually do much advertising business, but instead was owned by a secret consortium of all the cellular phone services to do just their stuff (what? oh just read on!), he gave some amazing insights on the whole issue. After graduating from a leading advertising institute, he was hired by this so-called advertising firm for a cool-paying copywriter's job, that required him to pen thousands of silly and inane SMSes, replete with sardarji scenarios and sexual entendres and what not. As he explained, these SMSes were then put up on servers for free download to cellphones, on some more servers for not so free download, and manually distributed to a few cellphones from where they spread like wildfire all over the place. The jokes spread exponentially - 1 bloke forwards to another, then the 2 to 4, 4 to 8, 8 to 16, 16 to 32, 32 to 64, 64 to 128...128 eventually to millions, and so on. Parallely as they spread, the circumference of Revenue pie charts of the cellular firms keep adding fat, while the share of revenue from SMS jokes on that pie chart keeps bulging in tandem. As he said, at the end of the day, the net share of revenue from these SMSes (manufactured at his old workplace, ie the SMS factory) turns out to be HUGE.

Wow. Brilliant. I made a desperate attempt to get my brain to multitask - on one hand, continue in the conversation, and on the other, make a rough estimate of all the money that got fleeced from me through my lifetime quota of SMS forwards, by this elaborate corporate conspiracy that played against the gullible human mind. However, the task of getting to a plausible estimate turned fruitless after a while - I simply lost count of the mind-addition of a myriad phone bills, and gave up. Suddenly, Frank Lampard scored, and our inane conversation came to a halt. England won the game and qualified for the world cup. Yippee! That meant that I just won the bet I had made months back with a friend on England's qualifying for the World Cup (he said nay, i said aye) . I quickly SMSed him to remind him of the beer and beeriyani that he owed me. I really should have bet Money, rather than khana-pina, dammit.

**

Harold Pinter, the leftist playwright surprisingly won the Nobel for literature, pipping the widely expected Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. Seriously, I didn't even know that he was in the race, and I still don't know for which work in particular he won it. I caught up with 3 pre-nobel analyses on the newscast, but can't remember even seeing him there. I've read just a couple of his political essays, where he called Bush and Blair 'idiots' - and I didn't enjoy them. I think he's the bloke who wrote the Monty Python series, but I'm not totally sure, I'll have to confirm from google or something very soon.

Please Spread Firefox. #

The Voice

'Free me' - The Voice hollered at me.

'Uh oh, I shan't, and dude, please keep your beaks shut for some time. I'm in NO mood to talk to you right now. Don't you see that I am trying to negotiate some horrible traffic?'. This was my annoyed riposte.

'You won't?'

'No, I shant. get lost!'

'But it is God's will that I be freed, and this is how the script has been, since time immemorial.'

'God's will?!' Where did that come from? 'Bah!' I said. 'God is merely an extension of our imagination. Don't try to play these mind games with me.'

Seriously, I am no Pol Pot or Hitleresque Oligarch. I would allow freedom to the voice, but impetuosity and cheekiness aren't somethings that I let get rubbed on my face. Besides, there is a time and place for everything, even freedom. I decided to be obstinate and tough. But the voice of the detainee was upto the challenge. More mental games followed.

'God maybe metaphysical, but He's like the Emperor's New Clothes. You need brains to figure him out. You need brains to understand whats written in the Gita, or the Quran, or the Bib'le. And if you understand what is written in these holy books, you will realise the existence of God.'

Hang on a darn second! The whole discussion on God was a tangent, to annoy me - why else would it butt in? And anyway, this discussion could have no practical consequence under the circumstances. I chose to ignore the voice. 'Hah, holy books. Read them to find the existence of God, and then say God wrote the holy books. What orbicular logic! Well, whatever, who cares.' These were the words I wanted to say, but didn't care enough to deliver out in our little telepathic conversation.

'Even if you don't free me, you do know I can free myself if I really wanted to, and when I'd be running free, you do realise that you wouldn't be able to stop me or even touch me, right?' this was the Voice's next jab at me.

A sweatdrop the size of a pea toppled down my left forehead, hit my glasses, split into two, and fell on two spots on my shirt and lap respectively. I was kinda cognizant of what the Voice was capable of doing, and I knew inside me that if he wanted to free himself, I couldn't do much, except be a helpless pokerface spectator, and mutely watch him run riot.

As much as the Voice was desperate for freedom, I was desperate for a smart riposte that would outwit him to stop muttering, and more importantly, give him the impression that I had far from wilted in this mental battle. But somehow any bright spark eluded me. In the meantime, the traffic freed up, and I got a nice stretch of road ahead of me.

'I'm not letting you free, and THAT'S IT!'. This was exactly what I didn't want to say, but did. The situation required me to say something with subtlety, something that wouldn't hurt the Voice's feelings and make him escape or something, but the fool that I am, I couldn't blurt out anything better. 'Shut the fuck up and get lost!' I added, arrogantly.

Noticeably, the tides turned in my favour. The Voice seemed to have simmered down at my overbearing haughtiness, and didn't pop out his evil head for a coupla minutes.

And when he did, he was a milksop submissive beggar - 'Will you puhleeeeeze let me free'?, he begged, sounding exactly like a 6 year old girl with freckles on the cheek. I had clearly won the mental war, and was in no mood or obligation to give a straight reply to my mere vanquished adversary, this pesky bete noire of a Voice, that had been irritating me for so long.

'hmmm, lets see, I'll think about it once I get home.' (This was part lie, for as I said earlier, I always intended to free him. I ain't no oligarch or cruel despot.)

I reached my apartment block. Parked the car, but didn't feel like checking the letterbox. The fight with the voice left me mentally and physically weary. Wasted no time to take the elevator straight up to the 7th floor, enter home, and open my shoes. Darted to the bathroom, undressed, and perched myself (my backside, rather) on the commode (potty). Right then, I was absolutely elated to be truly and literally on top of things, and in a whiff of chivalry, declared to the Voice with the emphatic air of a victorious general speaking to his demoralised and defeated counterpart - 'I free thee.'

I must admit, I did a great job at masquerading my vulnerabilities and fears behind all that chivalry. The Voice did screw me up physically and mentally for a while.

The Voice was gone, and I never heard from him again. Unlike all those moments before that when I was sooo desperate to hold him back at any cost, that moment, I felt the exact reverse. I was awefully pleased to not hold the Voice back anymore. In fact, a HUUGE surge of relief flowed through my body, mind and system because the Voice was gone. At that moment of relieved state, I closed my eyes, and took a deep breath as a physical affirmation of my relief.

High Flier

I picked up Volleyball as my favorite sport. The need for camouflaging my ineptness at the national religion, read Cricket, was pressing. And the diameter of the ball in this sport ensured that my hand-eye co-ordination will enable the proverbial 'contact'.

As the years passed and the Net became a phenomena, almost simultaneously the Volleyball net became my proving benchmark. Yeah, a pathetic pun, but bear it.
Stopping the striker on the opposite side dead in his tracks gave super-duper kick. The high flying ball, setup by the team-mate, eyed by the striker, to be hit at bullet-speed across the net; its a clockwork precision. To intercept that, Godlike.

There the realization dawned that I like being in air. Just that. Jumping. Feeling weightless. Escaping gravity for that brief millisecond. Its a freedom and elation I had not known before.

Later, I got introduced to the arena of Unreal Tournament. This game never gained any substantial fan-base when compared to Quake3. Yet, the deathmatch had one particular map which will go on to occupy my time-slots of endless nights. Its the "Morpheus" arena. Coincidentally, the id of my fellow blogger. But my preference to this arena has no bearings or indications for any alleged 'preference' to Comrade Morpheus.

View Morpheus

The arena has 3 buildings which rise high above the earth. The physics (and some bit of creativity) set the rule that the roof-tops are low gravity zones. Add a pair of anti-grav boots to this gameplay. And you get a thrill ride of jumps and flying across buildings. Hours of playing this arena left me feeling flying across the 3D world around me.

The effect allowed to fulfill my pleasure trip. Played Morpheus for about an hour at high difficulty settings just before going to sleep. The dreams which followed would have me flying and gliding in air. I have actually felt that the world is fleeting under my feet. I could glide as if on hovercraft-boots as well as cruise at high speeds la Superman style. While this sounds crazy, because the dream was so vivid and probably I wanted desperately to get the feel, it seemed all real. Makes me wonder the power of perception can blur the boundaries of reality and imagination.

Some other media where I got to live my imagination:
1. Superman
2. Matrix (Neo doing the superman thingy)
3. Watching astronauts on their jetpacks.
4. The oriental martial arts movies (Crouching Tiger Hidden Tiger)

What happened to the fearless little man, who stood up against injustice and defied the might of an oppressive army with just a shopping bag in hand? No one really knows, but its anyone's guess that the subject of one of the most profound photographs ever taken in the history of mankind was executed. In the words of the photographer Charlie Cole, 'People were executed at that time for far less than what he did.'

The rest of the first hand account from the photographer who snapped this iconic image at Tiananmen Square is here.

Finally..

The post below was posted via email. So I've finally figured the head and tail of this contraption.

Namak Halal

I prepared the marinade by combining the marinade ingridients in the medium bowl. I followed Raaj's advice literally to the tee - took great pains to arrange for a set of small, medium and large bowl to aid in cooking, at the cost of making the kitchen table look like it was straight out from the Bear household where Goldilocks had entered in some fairy tale.

Then I grilled the chicken at high broil. Yippee!! Some moments later, It was ready. I opened the little Black Label souvenir bottle to pour the remnants into one of my mothers most expensive drinking glass. Ah!the joy of a broiled chicken in the company of some smooth drink!

I lifted the lid of the pirex bowl to do some visual and olfactorial basking (is olfactorial even a word?). As I bent down and got my face close, the little moisture fog that was trapped inside the bowl breathed out to haze my glasses. I wiped the cloud off my glasses and put it back on my nose. I pressed a chicken piece a bit - 'twas optimally soft. The thing looked ok, it smelt great. I wasn't complaining about the looks part at all. I've never been that shallow a person. ;-)

Finally, the moment of truth. I took a chicken piece on one hand, and the glass on another. Switched on TV. Took a small sip of the drink. Took a bite of the chicken.

Aaargh!!

Holy fuck! I forgot to add salt..!!!

(*^!$#$%$^$%^#&^@!#*)(@#*@(#*^@!*&^#