I know that I wouldn’t be behaving or reacting any differently from the moment the clock strikes approximately 6:20 PM on the 24^th of June 2011, but it just makes me look back at that 13 year old who had issues as not having a color TV at home unlike a few of his classmates, that 15 year old struggling to figure out why he has to take up only Math and that 17 year old who had no clue where’s he would be getting in four years from then and that 21 year old who had no clue what he would be getting into two years from then.  Reminiscing those days brings in copious amounts of clichéd nostalgia, a certain amount of embarrassment notwithstanding. Looking back at life just makes me feel that life is just a series of choices, some major, some minor and some mere accidental that eventually shaped up the various circumstances which have brought me to where I am right now. Thinking of them leads me to a multitude of so called ‘what if’ and ‘if only’ scenarios that I reconcile once in a while for reasons ranging from making a conversation interesting to simple stress busting. Here are a few of these random muses

-          What if the guy who had tried to kidnap me in my third grade would have got his way? Well, I would either not have been around to write this or would have had more to write about it than a mere blog post. Who knows, I could also possibly have taken up begging, pick-pocketing and worked my way up to being one of the most wanted or something! Clearly a more exciting option, I must say!

-          There was a time after my tenth grade when I had to choose between biology and math. While Math was an easier bet, I did spend some time thinking about biology and in fact, imagined myself to be a doctor for a few days. I also remember trying to feel a doctor like pleasure after having administered some eye drops to my grandma during that time. If only, I had taken up biology, I sure would have ruined my life, for I was neither a good at drawing pictures (which is apparently required for good grades) nor was I a memory machine for I would have to remember quite a bit of stuff if I had turned out to be a doctor. Thankfully an engineer had tools to draw pictures which had fine edges and doesn’t really have to remember anything beyond two days before the exam and not a moment after.

-          The third one is a classic case of how something that happens in a certain capitalist superpower effects ordinary lives in the non-aligned third world. It was probably the most talked about metaphoric bubble called the ‘Dotcom’ bubble and it chose to burst for reasons unknown to me at that point of time. This was sometime around when I had to choose streams for my engineering. Had the popularity of computer engineering not taken a hit, I would surely have chosen it as my major against a certain stream starting with E followed by a C, something less known those days and even now. What if I had chosen to have the .c extension? Well, I guess I would just have earned a lot more money than I have right now and probably a lot less satisfaction if I go by the cribbing most of my software engineer chums. Thankfully for my choices, I had to take competitive exams that were not so competitive and I landed up in certain best engineering school in the country, albiet in a major that didn’t quite start with an E.

-          Now comes the biggie, and yet another classic case how America caught sneezed and the whole world caught cold and my life kind of hit rock bottom and being from a world class institute did quite help. It rather made things worse by increasing thrusting unnecessary expectations onto me. The great depression was when I learnt the lesson of my life, if you feel like you are working hard to achieve something; you probably are not meant for it.  If you aren’t enjoying the journey, you probably are on the wrong train! One thing led to the other and I ended being Piled Higher and Deeper, so to speak. It was better than the “Please Hire. Desperate” situation I was in, although I am being Paid Half what I Deserve. I just hope it doesn’t give me a Permanent Head Damage. I am now Patiently Hoping for my Degree.

Not the best of the stories, mine, but yeah looking forward to what lies ahead. I just hope it would be exciting and out of ordinary, at least in hindsight if not in actuality.

Finally, I do not know if I have to be sad or happy to learn that I can now contest for the Lok Sabha and the state legislative assemblies and drink hard liquor in Maharashtra, both being equally probable!! Although, I really do feel bad about not being eligible for those ‘attractive openings’, that somehow end up in my inbox, seeking young and energetic applicants for a delightful career in the ‘talking to the idiots on the other side of the globe’ industry!!

It’s not everyday that I write a review for a movie on my blog but this one’s really touching. An archipelago of shaving lotion in the ocean of blade telugu movies (words by Krish Ashok). Well, I agree, Telugu movies are cliche, they have fat heros who can get the goons flying by a slight brush on their mustache, they can blast tata sumos by snapping their fingers and reverse trains by slapping their thighs. But this one hits the very foundation of the outdated ‘hit formulae’ used to make the so called “Out and Out family entertainers” which the telugu script writers think they write.

When I first came across ‘Vedam’, a multi-starrer movie starring Allu Arjun, Anushka and Manchu Manoj, I had absolutely no hopes. I spun the quintessential telugu movie into my head, imagining both these people fall in love with the chick and they fight and blah blah happens and they live happily ever after. Only after I heard that it was made by Krish, the guy who made “Gamyam” did I feel this one should be good. Obviously the recommendations flowed in from near and dear and everything fell into place thankfully and I finally ended up watching the movie. It is not a movie that makes you cry, it is not a movie that makes you laugh, it is one of those movies that just shuts you up, blanks your mind and you don’t utter a word when its over, a mark of THE perfect movie.

What makes the movie good is the sheer contemporariness and maturity of the script. As the audience get more and more mature, drawing a think line between good and evil (like the Ramayana) just doesn’t help. The audience want to know why the bad guy does so and his reasons for the same. They want to know the story behind that chain snatcher  on the road, that rich man”s arrogant son and that roadside prostitute and her companion eunuch.  They want to see the bad guy turn good. This precisely is what I believe is the finest element of the movie. This is where the movie got its first good shot at the nail.

The second shot came with yet another aspect of the movie that makes this movie superior to any other telugu(or any other language) movie of recent times is the message it gives to the viewers. It is not uncommon to have a five story plot in a movie, it is not uncommon to bring cohesion into the five stories, it is also not uncommon to bring out an explicit message out of the five story movie but to bring about cohesion into the five stories and bring out a subtle message is what makes this movie one of the best movie in the recent times.

All this coupled with a fine screenplay, meticulous cinematography, good performances by the actors made the final hit and hence Krish “Nailed it”

So I highly recommend Vedam to all people who understand telugu. It is I believe in the best interest of the telugu audience if we get to see more and more movies like this.

My six-year-old self needed god like never before and never after to get me out of the crisis at that moment of sheer grief and the second highest tear-flow-in-one-go moment of my life. Much to my dismay, I wasn’t finding any hindu god idol around in that shady balcony. There was a collage photograph displaying places to visit in Andhra Pradesh. There was a picture hyderabad’s famous Buddha statue in one corner and he was the one for me that day. That was the only time when I asked god something very operational and non-abstract, “Please take me home”.

This helped me muster the courage to get down the stairs of the dingy and empty “Holiday Home”, a railway rest house meant for railway staff visiting the temple town. I saw two men at the reception, busy jotting things down into a register. If it had been now, I would have assumed these people belonged to the same gang as the other guy I had the good fortune of meeting about an hour ago. Thanks to my six year old innocence, I din’t go down that lane.

The older of the two comforted me, patted on my back(perhaps) to calm me down and asked me to tell him what happened. I neither had the frame of mind nor the vocabulary to describe what all happened since morning. So I blurted out a series of sentences not necessarily in order each separated by sobs and a substantial amount of tears. But here’s what I would have told him had I been 17 years older than then…

When pappa asked me to deliver an envelope of his daily reports to his boss at his residence which was jus a few yards away from home, I jumped with joy. This was because, I could catch with Nikku and Dolly(whom I’ve not met for more than a decade now) even before the school going rickshaw arrived. Yet another incentive being the fact that, it would put off taking bath for a few minutes which was great! After handing over the the envelope to Boss uncle and not being able to meet the kids because they were busy taking bath, I came down the stairs.

That was when HE came to me. I remember he had a dark complexion and was pretty short compared to other adults. But fail to remember his face or the dress he wore or anything else. He said, “Your dad is calling you”. I said, “Well, I am going back home now!” and started to walk away and asked him to join me. But he said, “No No, not that way”. “Where else?”, I asked. “Come along with me” he said, taking me in the opposite direction. Irrational me, what the hell was I thinking. It was my dad who sent me to this place from home, and this guy was taking me away from home saying my dad is calling me. Stupid me went along this guy. I was imagining my dad left to office and he wanted me to come there, for some reason, may be a gift or something!! Because I remember he said the day before that he would buy me new pair of shoes.

Assuming he was taking me to dad’s office, I was subtly giggling at this guy’s navigation skills, “He could have taken me this way, it would have been nearer”.  But I was more than happy with myself for being considerate and compassionate enough to accommodate the guy’s handicap and going with the flow. He talked to me as though he knew my dad well. He also told me about a watch which my dad bought for me a couple of days back. While this could be mysterious, I think it was more of a guesswork. Then he took me to a lawyer’s house which I have no clue why. The lawyer was unavailable though. So we came out of the building and started moving further. I know my dad’s office was not really far away from there.

Sprouts of suspicion finally arose, better late than never, when the guy said, “thats not the place”, when I started running towards my dad’s office. He took me further on that road. He bought a bunch of beedis from a tea shop. And took me further. That was when I started wondering why on earth would my dad ask me to come to him when I was getting so damn late to school. I guess, by now, I should have missed my rickshaw too!!

We went straight on the main road, took many a rights and lefts, so I lost the sense of direction. We crossed the railway tracks as well. He tried to open up an abandoned railway bogey and I had no clue why on earth he was doing that! It was only later that it made sense. He wanted to use it to ‘hide’ me!

It was when he took me all the way to terrace of “Holiday Home”, through what I thought was a subtle back entrance (which later turned out to be the front entrance) and broke the news to me that he was a ‘thief’ and has “kidnapped” me after having asked my dad’s name and other details! I remember having burst into tears and him asking me to shut myself up and otherwise he would wield the knife out his pocket (and do what, stab me to death!!). Of course he din’t have a knife, he would have shown it to me otherwise. Then came a long pause when I was sitting silently crying the hell out of myself on the stairs leading to the terrace and this guy was sitting idle apparently not knowing what to do next. After a while. he stood up and left after warning me against budging from that place. I am sure, he was having a nature call by the way he sounded and ran away.

Now, I was lying there hopeless, praying to “Lord Buddha” and explaining the story with to two complete strangers. As I said, I donot remember this people’s faces but the older one amongst asked me not to worry and shall take me home. Luckily I knew my address by heart so there was not much of a problem. He first took me to a coconut vendor and ask me to sit there for sometime till he comes back. He told my story to the coconut vendor and I was hoping she would give me one coconut free of cost out of compassion but she didn’t. He then took me to a police control room, where we lodged a complaint and the police constable asked me my address and how this man looked etc.

Then this man took me to his house where much to my dislike I was served a glass of hot milk (yakk!!) which I had to gulp down my throat. Guess, that was the price I had to pay for getting back home. Only after a while did the son of this old man arrive and was supposed to take me back home on his scooter. I remember being pretty excited about getting onto a scooter other than my dad’s for a change. But he din’t take me home directly again. Now, this was an interesting coincidence. He took me to the same lawyer’s building which the kidnapper had taken me to, but to a different floor. I tried to explain this to him but either he didn’t quite understand what I was saying or he had no intentions of being a Sherlock Holmes.

I finally met my dad near his office, while me and the scooter uncle were on our way back home. My dad who saw me from a distance told me later on that he wasn’t able to believe his eyes and thought I was someone else! Anyways he brought me back home which was already crowded with people from the neighborhood. Everybody let out a sigh of relief. They asked me where I had been. I really had no answer. I just said, “Far away, Very far away” and starting shedding tears again. Later on, I was told that my parents left no stone unturned to find me. They of course inquired with everybody in the neighborhood and apparently one women saw this guy when he was picking me up at boss uncle’s place. They also went to a fortune-teller, who told them that I had gone towards the east (which was right!!) and I will be back soon (which I did!!). They also checked at school to know if I my over-enthusiastic self went to school somehow in his pajamas!!!

Looking back at this after so many years, I was just thinking what this guy would be doing right now, has he been able to build his career as a kidnapper. Given the pathetic performance in my case, I think it was a bad career choice for him!! I just hope he is doing good now, after all he was my kidnapper and I was the reason for his Ruined Ransom Reverie.

“Enough is enough, I can’t take this anymore, I can’t miss it. Screw everything else. I’m not gonne miss this one”, I told myself as I closed my lappy shut as it was displaying the cricbuzz page (cricinfo wasn’t working today). That was the time when the highest score in an ODI match by a single player was 194.  I sprinted towards the wing TV (Yeah! My wing has a TV). The seemingly cozy, TV lounge of my wing, which looks like an Arabian Theater Prop (sans the dames and the hooka) was hustling with activity. With obviously no place to sit, I perched my head like a cuckoo in between the decorative beady hangings to get a sideways glance of the TV setuP at one corner of the cozy Boudoir.

Tendlya was 182 then. I was left aghast when he worked away wide of short fine all the way to the rope reaching his previous best score followed by an applause like never before in our otherwise quite wing. From then on, anything and everything was useless apart from the master blaster’s >194 score. It was the first time when I saw the otherwise ‘geela’ men at IIM not turned on by a bikini clad model walking out of water (what was she doing  in a cement ad anyway!!).

Well, that unfortunately was the final four that came out the Sachin’s wood. This was followed by an annoying string of Dho(n)ing by the Captain. I bet Dhoni was the one who was cursed more than anyone else today for not giving strike to Sachin. No one cared about the total which India is going to put up to the Proteas who could very well do a Johannesberg on this batting paradise at Gwalior.

The 49th over was when Dhoni must have hit the 1 billionth curse mark closely followed by the Umpire who din’t give that first ball as a wide, and of course infinite boos to Steyn who appealed for that first ball. For the first time, all Indian fans were hoping that the ball be scooped before it hit the boundary except for the last ball of course but almighty had other plans. Then comes the THE over.

In the last over of the match, the first ball was hit to what could well the most hated SIX in the history of Indian Cricket. The ball flew over the long off boundary into the stands with just a jab from the most despised Indian Captain ever at that moment. It was in the next ball when the (tangy) AMLA came to regulate the air from the Indian FAN base. He must have no doubt received infinite flying kisses from all the she(and gay)-Indians.

Then came THE moment, while I went goosebumps all over, there was pin drop silence around inbetween the distant din from not very important sources at this moment. As Langeveldt bowled, I swear everything went into a peter-parkerish slow motion. But that was too fast for what happend next and BANG! the TONdulkar became the TON-DUAL-KAR.

Though the match isn’t yet over, I chose to write this down to mitigate the unavoidable procrastination that kicks in after the adrenaline supply chokes off. WIN or NO WIN, today is a WIN WIN for all Indian Cricket fans. Praveen Kumar and Sreeshanth are kicking the ass of the Da(ya)kshin Africans anyway.

Like a friend on my FB said,  SACHIN is GOD. period. (Atleast for now)

Well, I no big fan of being on camera…but somehow I end up being on it twice, that too sharing the screen space with none other than the god of wittiness, the one and only, ” Cyrus Broacha”!

Yeah!, you got it right! One of the advantages of being in a world-class B-School, you get to rub shoulders with the who’s who of any field what so ever! Without much ado, here’s what happend:

I din’t realize that I was right in front of the crowd until Cyrus came unto me to ask me to dance with a girl who claimed her ‘ego’ was ‘dancing’. Cyrus says, “Come along man, dance with her. (Turns to her) look you have got a male dancer too”…I say “Oh! my god. No” while the crowd around starts Booing and clapping and what not at my plight. Then Cyrus says “Whats wrong with u man? You don’t like the girl”. I say “Well, I don’t like dancing!”. He says “No man likes dancing. They only are in the constant quest of getting their female”.

I step in reluctantly wondering how embarrassing this could get, and the girl says “I wud have danced with u Cyrus” and I get pushed back into ignominy again. I could sense all the blood of my body pump into my face. He then resumes his interview with the group of chicks.

2. After having done with the chicks, he moves on, I being the first person behind him , he says “lets start with this guy”, and asks me name. I blurt it out. Then he asks, “Do you know me?”..and I say “Well!!” and give a puzzled expression. Now this might seem witty at the face of it, but take my words, I was so damn nervous to talk with all the infinite hormonal activity in my brain.

Then, in an attempt to get comfortable I said “I know you Cyrus, who doesn’t know you” after a smile < I could actually sense the stupidity in that smile>.

Then he asked, “Whats my ego? < It was a promotional campaign for wipro’s ego lappies>, I mean whats your ego, I mean whats my ego” or something like that…Unable to understand whether the ego was mine or his I jus said “to get things done”. He then says “That means you are a go-getter” and I was like, well, I din’t know that with a baffling look in my face. Then he asked me to look into the camera and say “I am a go-getter”. And :’) <rivers of tears> I said it.

“I AM A GO-GETTER”, sounding like a complete idiot.

And then he moves on to the other girls standing besides me. Now the embarrassment knew no bounds. I just hoped I had the Mr. India watch so that I could get invisible from there. Or somehow, I could be reduced to dust then and there.

While I finally got the freebee/freebie (I don’t know the correct spelling), the question stands. What’s really my ego! I am definitely not a go-getter, I am probably a “counter go-getter”, that is I never get something which I always wanted and end up getting something totally different. On the Contrary, I think what I implied by saying “Getting things done” was “Jugaad”, getting things done by hook or crook. Expedite any and every resource available and getting the best out of it.

Now, I would have never known that had Cyrus not visited my high profile B-school today. Thanx to Cyrus I am a fan.<with all molecules of shame drained out of my body>

I’m typing this after I ran back from that place, trudging in a path less taken so that no one could see me.

P.S : Don’t forget to read the previous post as well

Should I be sad?

Should I be happy that I am not sad?

Should I be feeling guilty that I am not being sad?

Should I be guilty for not being sad for something which I am supposed to be sad for?

Should I make an issue out of me not being guilty of not being sad for something which I think I should be sad?

Should I be feeling guilty for making an issue out of me not being guilty of not being sad for something which I think I should be sad?

Am I be sad that I am feeling guilty for making an issue out of me not being guilty of not being sad for something which I think I should be sad?

Should I be sad…and so on…..

AAAAAARRGGHHH!!!!!!

Do I have to fear the unbounded irrationality triggered by the adrenaline rush that I am being subjected to? Or do I have to fear the ramifications of rationing this irrationality as it would never be possible for me to reach this crest again.

Am I expected to live perpetually in this state of unbearable ignominy arising out of the deliberate passivity I subjected myself in order to hasten the transition from acquaintance to infatuation to adoration and so on to infinite?

More baffling to me is the peril of this being miscomprehended as mere amour, a presumption typical to the mediocre homo-sapiens attributable to the sheer ineptitude of their respective and respectable noggins.

You could always deprecate the mere lack of brevity in the aforementioned assertions, imperatives and interrogations. While I value the endurance with which you have tried to construe this brouhaha of mediocre and unintelligent use of the thesaurus, I believe that parsimony in my vocabulary would neither have phoenixed the afflicted state of my mind nor would helped in the de-stressing which has been in desideratum for quite some time now.

Here’s an end of yet another year, probably (but not hopefully) the most colorful year of my life with the infinite topsies and turvies and plateaus and planes and hurricanes and springs..and everything that you could find in a geography textbook. Upon hindsight, although i am tempted to let out a gasp, but since it is cliche, I wouldn’t.

The year started on a ‘tear’sy and a ‘mucas’y note (literally) and I tell you it was really sticky and it was just too much of it all around. However, I still swam thorough it (seems creepy eh!).

I definitely made some wrong/stupid/idiotic/moronic/daft/preposterous/curse my vocab choices and I did make some pretty goods ones too. Although I donot regret both and am loving where I am right now

I did really see how one could BE/NOT BE there for someone when he/she is in deep s**t and what it means to BE or NOT BE. I thank all the people who did the BE thing to me and my apologies to all those whom I subjected to the NOT BE thing.

Thanx to all the beautiful people who (came into/were already in) my life for having altered its course forever and made a huge difference to me in many ways.

And my special thanx to all those who have read this unto this point, coz that means you really care about me.

Wishing all my readers (and i hear an echo) a Happy and a Prosperous (getting rich types) and a rocking(not the chair) New year. Hope all your (and my) wishes come true this year! And if you do get rich, dont forget me!!

The first anniversary of 26/11 just passed by and our sweet news channels used it to the fullest to boost their revenues. However this reminded me of the one of the most memorable(read forgettable) three days of modern day India. I don’t want to be the one giving the yadda yadda about how it changed the way mumbaikars lived, or how it changed the ‘geo-political’ situation of the country. I only wanted to reflect upon how tragedy brings people emotionally and socially close to each other and how bad times are as important as good times in everybody’s lives. I am sure there would not be a single Indian who has not felt goosebumps pondering about what happened almost an year back.I am sure all of them have definitely shed tears(atleast metaphorically) for those of their brethren who fell prey to the most outrageous religious doctrines of the modern day world, on that day when terrorism as always has broke all its benchmarks.

So strong I believe this feeling is, that people still exclaim “You were at Mumbai at that time! You experienced it first hand!”, and I am like “Dude, there was me and another 1.4 million and still counting people in Mumbai at that time, there’s absolutely nothing special about it”.

There is no better way of concluding than paying my tributes to those who lost their lives in lieu of the lunacy of some others who ought to be killed ASAP.

Later in the evening, “Oh, that hurts!!!….grow up mr. Kalak, you are not that agile now!!!”, I told myself after the bizzare attempt to fold my legs so that I could rest my head on the knees while I key into my lappy trying to imitate that arbit girl from EB lounge sitting a few seats away from here. While she continues to effortlessly key in her desires into her pink(insert frown here) laptop,  I see a cloud, right above my head, with ST in it saying animatedly, “phul jayega tu!! phul ke phat jayega..look at your CLT(Cute little Tummy)!!!”

Weight has never been a problem for me. I always believed the my body was completely under my control. All my weight spikes have been cyclic and I had an effective strategy to deal with all of them and it has been quite successful I can say.

But this time, somehow, the IIMB food, which I keep cursing all the time, has been really effective in rounding me off (if you understand what I am saying). Added to this, the disgusting climate of Bangalore (ya read it right, DISGUSTING), where you wouldn’t sweat even I you run a 50KM marathon at top speed. I’ve always lived in hot humid places where sweat comes more or less by default without any effort. Humans have to sweat and subsequently stink and that is why the climate here sucks. Imagine going to Ooty in summer against living there forever, creepy right, thats how I feel right now.

I don’t want to be that common man with a ponch which looks like it’s housing a 5 month embryo. I gotto start working on it!!!…lets see what I can do…Will keep you updated…