You have been bundooed. Part I.

The car was zipping down the winding road of the hill when the inspector spots its missing number plate from the bottom of the hill. He sends his crony forward waving his three and a half foot bamboo lathi trying to stop the car. Predictably enough, the car brakes at the last minute and plasters the black road with rubber, to stop inches from the vacillating crony in khaki.

The super dark window of the gleaming white car rolls down with the characteristic whirr of a power window. The crony, still shaken by the smoking rubber on the road, hobbles up to the window and screams, “pagal ho gaya kya re, makade!”

In one quick, bone chilling second, a head turns outwards and upwards to face the crony. The crony realises his knees have now turned to a mass of wobbling jelly under the white hot, intense gaze of the driver. His skin turns a glistening wet. His tongue finds the deepest recesses of his mouth to hide. And is bladder just about to give way, when a hand falls with a thud on his shoulder.

The inspector pulls the crony back and steps forward towards the car. He bends into the window, looks straight into the eyes of the driver. And in a menacingly level, no nonsense tone, says to the driver, “bahar nikal.”

Holding the inspector’s gaze, the driver considers brushing this fly’s ass of an inspector aside for all of 45 seconds. And he decides to step out of the car. He had this desperate urge to pee.

Sensing his victory in the first battle, he says in the same level tone to the driver as he gets out, “license nikal!” The driver pulls his pants up to its right millimetric position at his own sense of leisure. Then he raises a palm up to the inspector and gives him a look powerful enough to make the most villainous run for the cover of their mothers’ pallus. And he walks across the road leaving the open-mouthed, seething inspector frozen in his tracks.

The driver unzips and opens the gates of his dam. Soon, a large puddle forms at his feet. A buffalo’s youngling sets off on a gallop sensing a mud wallow. The driver zips up and starts back to the car with his uncanny swagger that vaguely reminds the inspector of Rajni. He reaches the car, and in one smooth, almost choreographed movement, changes his direction, leans on the car and fishes out a packet of chota gold flake, and sticks one in his mouth. Head slanted low, eyebrows raised, the driver looks at the inspector from the gap between his duplicate Gucci shades and his brow.

The inspector tilts his head, amused by the driver’s antics and asks him, “naam kya hai tera?”

The driver lights his chota gold flake, takes a deep drag and looks up towards the inspector al la Clint Eastwood, and blows his shitty cigarette's smoke straight into his face.

And he says, “James. Sumanth James.”

To be continued.

Sing along!

Me me me!

Hari took the free ColorQuiz.com personality test! "Needs a way of escape from all that oppresses him ..." Click here to read the rest of the results.

What's in a name!

A little before my brother and I were born, Vasanta and Charyulu had this understanding. They would have two kids, girls ideally. The first one would be named by Charyulu and the next one by Vasanta.

To their immense disappointment, I was the first successful sperm.

Now, however disappointed, Charyulu had to find this name for me. The dutiful son that he is, he asked his mom, her sisters, Vasanta’s mom, her dad, their brothers and sisters, and their parents, wherever available, for a suitable name for this 2 and a half kilo packet of nuisance.

For the lack of a more suitable expression, bless their souls, each of them suggested a letter. Charyulu collected all of them and the count came to 26. And he put all of them together into four words so it would not be too hard for them to pronounce it. They had to call me by this monster after all, you see.

And so I have more letters in my name than boxes in an application form. Lines in an app form are found a little wanting too.

But calling someone by a 26 letter name to suggest the use of a potty instead of a saucepan is rather difficult, considering the tsunami of a rage that tends to accompany such instances. So Charyulu chose the shortest part of my 26 letter train for daily use.

And so, the world calls me a 4-letter word.

And he took flight

Fearless was the young ornithologist who went by the name of Arjun. Keen of the eye and sharp of the mind, unquenchable was his thirst for adventure. And insatiable his hunger for knowledge.

Early one morn, at the crack of dawn, the intrepid ornithologist rose from bed and set out to find a treasure of knowledge in the dingy alleyways of Jumeraat Bazaar. Two streets down, he came upon a scrawny and dubious looking peddler, towing a cartful of literature, bound in leather. He scaled walls by night, peddled by morning and called himself Ali. Alas, books, to him, merely balanced a weighing stone on the other side of a balance.

A sparkle set itself ablaze in his eye the instant they fell upon the dirty pile. And Arjun began sifting the sand for the nugget in gold. Grains dropped through the hourglass in torrents. As did perspiration through the pores. Arjun, keen as he was, kept on, regardless of the hour. Regardless of the heckles raised on the peddler. Regardless of the incessantly growing din in the dingy bazaar.

Rise he did, clutching a leather-bound hard enough to inspire white on his knuckles. When he did, triumph wrote an allegory across his forehead. He held the chronicle of a hero, a man who coerced an entire generation to look skywards. A man who taught the world that a bird was an angel in disguise.

Fleet of the foot as he was, he reached his den in no time, and threw himself headlong into the chronicle – an account of the experiences of the hero, in pursuit of the White-tailed Tropicbird from Samoa. One of only three species of the Tropicbird, the bird was magnificence written across the inconceivably blue Samoan skies.

Less of leather and more of adventure the chronicle smelt. And it unravelled the tethers of imagination in the young man. The expectation put a resonating throb of a concoction of young blood and adrenalin in his temples. Tatters were how his resistance and reason lay, and a deep breath did Arjun take. He willed the Samoan spirit into his veins.

Three weeks passed but the passion survived. And down set the young man his foot on Samoan soil. Along snaked the road from Apia to Sa‘Moana, and with it sped the young man they called Arjun.

He set his sails southwards on small vessel and in search of the island of the White-tailed Tropicbird. Across the sky the sun stretched. The salt of the sea met the salt of his perspiration. Soon enough, out of the blue sea grew a speck of green. That spec grew to a mountain. And so did his eagerness to set foot on that land.
Suddenly, the vessel sputtered and choked itself to a fuming death. The maritime beast had a hole in its heart, and away she bled across the ocean for miles behind, leaving her tanks dry. With the island in site, and an oar without, the young man and his vessel bobbed at the mercy of a ruthless ocean.

For this alone he lived, this relentless explorer. He tore a strip of metal off the boat and made an oar of it. Short as it was, he moved slow. But move he did. Alas, he was no match to the massive white waves of the mighty ocean and tumbled into the sea.

The ocean thrashed him with rocks, dragged him along urchins, and doused him in water. But the boy was steadfast. He reached the beach and screamed at the sea, “Is that all my friend?” And his laughter tinkled.

His vessel in shambles, his garb in tatters and his hope on the decline he screamed for help. For three days and three nights he screamed. And his voice found no mate. Dejected, hungry, and utterly out of hopelessness he looked up towards the mountain. And he heard it thunder. Boulders rolled down. The earth trembled. Birds flew from their perches. Even the ocean succumbed into silence. And it rose to the sky from the top of the mountain. A plume of smoke.

Soon.

Scared. Excited. Worried. Holding my breath. Vacillating. Eager. Confident. Guarded. Unsure. Prepared. Nowhere near it. Determined. Nervous. Like steel. Irrational. Frantic. Tired. Impatient. Absolutely scatterbrained. Bubbling. Bursting. Petrified. On the edge. Back. On the edge again.

I've waited 12 years to feel exactly like this. And I can't wait one minute longer. Ladakh, here I come.

**********

Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia or Abulafia was a thirteenth century Jewish scholar and philosopher. Among all of his deeply philosophical pursuits and passions, he had this obsessive belief that alphabets, numerals, vowel-points and their infinite permutations hid the purpose of human existence and the “truth”.

Umberto Eco wrote this incredible book called Focault’s Pendulum. Now related to as the intelligent man’s Da Vinci Code (I got this from Wikipedia!), the book is about these three nerdy editors who think they’ve stumbled upon the truth of the universe and get into a world of trouble and, of course, adventure! One of three editor has a computer, or a “Word Processor”, that he called Abulafia.

This guy (for the frailty of memory, lets call him Bob) is a really interesting character. He believes, like a lot of others, that the true name of God is one particular combination of the several million characters of the Torah. And that Abulafia and Basic Programming (can you believe this!) could be the key to cracking the right combination of God’s name. In other words, the “Password” to the truth.

The third editor (the first one is our protagonist) believes that the point of the belief that the combination of characters makes God’s name and the pursuit of finding that is to give people a purpose in life, a religious direction, and other theological implications of that. So he is completely opposed to the idea of using Abulafia for this purpose (even though both know that the piece of medieval hardware they call Abulafia would take close to 30 million years to get all the combinations in place, let alone find the right one).

So the story begins with Bob going missing. One night he calls our protagonist, the first editor, and tells him that their “Plan” or theory about the truth of the universe was true, and that the details of it were in Abulafia (all this while vacillating and scaring the large intestine out of the protagonist). Bob manages to tell the hero that his life is in grave danger (in true bollywood, no hollywood style) and hangs up, abruptly.

Our hero reaches Bob’s apartment at the speed of light, tumbles over an assortment of books, paraphernalia and other nonsense a complete nerd would have in an apartment, scampers over to Abulafia, turns it on, and wheezing like a pug with an asthma attack stares into the screen, dumbfounded.

The screen says, “Do you have the password?”

The hero has this desperate sense of urgency to save his fellow nerd (Bob). So he gets about the business of hacking into Abulafia so he can understand what Bob is really stuck in and exactly where in hell he is. He works all evening, all night, the whole of the next day, the whole of the next evening, punching password after password. He tears his hair out and that of a stuffed toy lying on a shelf next to him trying to figure out what the password could be. Names of girlfriends (not that Bob had many), dates, books, places Bob liked, absolutely everything. But each time, Abulafia returns the same answer. “Invalid password. Do you have the password?”

Just as he snubs out the last cigarette in the apartment, in a fit of utter frustration, he tries his last attempt before he puts Abulafia under a train. And he types “No”.

Abulafia flickers to life.

Evolution!

This is an article I found here.

I still can't believe there is any debate about the reality of evolution as a process in nature, but large groups of people continue to resist any form of scientific revelation. Part of the reason is no doubt related to religion, as for whatever reason, evolution and religion have been put in a cage with each other with orders to kill. Last time I checked, evolution made no claims as to how or why we got here, so there's no reason you can't have your religious beliefs at the same time you can admire a mysterious process that influences all life.

Need proof? Look no further than the Italian wall lizard, which were introduced to an island off the coast of Croatia back in 1971. Scientists placed 5 adult pairs on the island and have recently returned to see what happened. There are now 5,000 lizards running around, all genetically related to the original 5 immigrants. What could possibly have happened in only 30 years?

From National Geographic:

Pod Mrcaru, for example, had an abundance of plants for the primarily insect-eating lizards to munch on. Physically, however, the lizards were not built to digest a vegetarian diet.

Researchers found that the lizards developed cecal valves—muscles between the large and small intestine—that slowed down food digestion in fermenting chambers, which allowed their bodies to process the vegetation's cellulose into volatile fatty acids.

"They evolved an expanded gut to allow them to process these leaves," Irschick said, adding it was something that had not been documented before. "This was a brand-new structure."

Along with the ability to digest plants came the ability to bite harder, powered by a head that had grown longer and wider.

Scientists are stunned at how rapid evolution took hold and created a physical transformation of the lizard. An amazing example of evolution at work.

Reclaimation.

If you had to look back on your life, what would you remember?
The promotion? The performance bonus?
The plaque in the conference room?
It does not take supreme intelligence to know what really matters.
And yet, you do little besides look in the distance and sigh.
Wouldn't it be tragic to realise too late that you didn't see the trap? That you didn't recognise the two words that are the biggest curse of humanity... 'maybe someday'?

I'm leaving for Ladakh on 17th May, 2008.

Not on a Safari. On a Bullet.

And one more!

Black screen. Green letters.

This feels like the computer I used in 1987. Remember those days of "Logo" and "Basic". Damn I was good with that shit! I drew a house using all those lousy commands. I was probably in 4th Class (Grade, if you like). And could barely boot a computer with DOS. And I drew a house with things like rt 45, Lt 90 etc. My computers teacher was so excited, we thought she was having a seizure.

Talking about excitable people, do you remember that guy Siddhu? Yeah the same one who swallowed the unabridged volume of English Idioms whole. If you were to stand right in front of him when he's in one of his English moods, I'm guessing, you'd have a nice shower of morning dew.

Actually, if you've ever seen Doogie Howser M.D., I guess this is exactly how he must've felt.

Ah! but you're not seeing this clump of gibberish right now like I am. Kinda like seeing the ad for a gargantuan, plasma-LDC-projection-3D television on your old EC TV (God you remember those days!).

So click here. And hit F11 once the window opens. You'll see for yourself!

Smell that?

This is killer stuff. Part II

The song (The band: Avial, the song: Chekele or Takathara) has been used for the Ligy J. Pullappally film, "Sancharram". I've pasted a little about the film that I found here.

Sancharram (English: The Journey) (2004) is a Malayalam short-film written, directed and produced by Ligy J. Pullappally, inspired both by her short film Uli and a true story of two lesbian lovers in the South India state of Kerala.

The film follows two young friends, Kiran (Suhasini V. Nair), a Hindu, and Delilah (Shrruiti Menon), a Catholic, from their first meeting as young children to young adulthood, when they realize that they have a lifelong (lesbian) love for each other.

At first, Kiran is asked to write love letters to Delilah for Rajan (Syam Seethal) a teenage boy who also has a long-standing crush on Delilah. Kiran does so as it allows her to express her love to Delilah without having to be ostracized by her family, friends and culture. Eventually Delilah discovers the truth behind the letters and poetry, and admits her mutual love to Kiran. The begin a delicate love affair despite social taboos against homosexuality.

Their blossoming love affair is dampened severely when Rajan discovers Kiran and Delilah stealing a moment of intimacy in the jungle. He proceeds to inform Amma (Lalitha K.P.A.C.), Delilah's mother, of what he (briefly) witnessed. Amma confronts Delilah, who reveals her love for Kiran. In response, Amma arranged Delilah's marriage with a suitor who recently visited intent on seeking a bride. Delilah reluctantly consents to the marriage.

Sancharram has been compared to Deepa Mehta's Fire, a movie which also touches upon lesbian relationships in India. However, where Fire is explicit in stating that the main characters enter their relationship due to the failure of their heterosexual marriages, Sancharram is clearly a film about two lesbians who fall in love with each other.

Quote

"Dude.. don't worry about the chinkies baap..they have.. err.. tiny ching changs.."

Found this on a guy's profile on Orkut.

The writer's blogs:
http://terpsikure.blogspot.com/
http://shivakarukonda.blogspot.com

On-stage

There was this guy who was invited on-stage to present awards for a certain category at the Goafest ’08. He was the Chair of the Jury for that particular category.

He comes on stage, takes the mic for the few words he’s expected to say as the chair of the jury, in front of a crowd that’s s booing anybody choosing to actually take up that offer for talking.

He says, “I always wanted to say motherfu@#$% on stage. There, I said it.” And he hands the mic back.

Holier than thou?

Ad people are a strange lot.

I was at the Goafest about a week back. It was the most exciting festival I’ve seen in a long, long time. I love it. The sun, the parties, the unlimited alcohol, the sea, the unbridled passion for great creative work, basically everything about it. Which is exactly why I’ve been at all the three editions of the festival.

But the one thing I’ve not been able to get a fix on is how people don’t mingle. There is no animosity, or hatred (I put that a little too strongly for the loss of a better word to describe exactly what I mean). But there is that invisible boundary. A space, if you like, that cannot be breached. People are social, having fun, accommodating and all, but they just don’t mingle.

Why? Maybe it’s this deep-seated “our-work-is-better-than-yours” feeling. Or it’s that fierceness of competitive instinct and passion.

But its definitely there. Why else would even the most charming act I put up not let me land even one chick (in spite of the fact that she’s obviously interested)? Alright, I’m a little boring. But then, even the more charming guys ended up with zilch.

There is obviously something wrong. And I wonder “what it is!”

!

!

Ever wanted more hours in a day?

Surprisingly, you can get them! And upto 6 hours extra!

Consider this, we spend a large chunk of the day sleeping. If you could change that sleeping habit, we, obviously, more hours! This does not mean depriving yourself of sleep at all.

Most adults sleep in one stretch. Kids sleep in several stretches. And infants nap all the time! Animals don’t sleep in a chunk either. That we need to sleep for 8 continuous hours was apparently a recent habitual development, before we had bulbs and the likes around.

So this girl (Rachel something) and her boyfriend decided to get to the bottom of this and see if they could stagger their sleep and get those extra hours.

Their theory is: take a 20 to 30 minute nap every 4 hours. So in a day, you’d grab about (less than) 3 hours of sleep. After about a week, your body rhythms adjust to this new sleep pattern so every time you nap, you slip directly into REM sleep. And you’re totally rested and fresh all the time!

They call it “polyphasic sleep”. She’s experimenting this theory, and I hope to whoever is upstairs that it works!

You can find her experiment here.

I don't know what to call this.

You want something really bad. And it steps right in front for you. You look at it. Closely. For all of 15 seconds. And you brush it aside. "Nah! Not this." And then you're restlessly, incessantly looking for something that you don't really want, but just think you do.

Guess nothing should come easy.