LOST!

People, I lost my right to taunt and boo at other people for their absent mindedness (esp. at a certain poor guy who's always the butt of my jokes :P) approximately 20 hours ago :| You can't really do that, not when you've forgotten around half a dozen cards and papers, a driving license, a phone book, and a thousand and a thirty bucks on a park bench...all in a stupid, tiny, insipid..ah, there's the word, wallet. The limit of forgetfulness, don't you think? Yeah, even you go on...par at least poori story toh sun lo, so you can jeer in more detail :P

The story starts on a regular dead boring day in class, a torturous test on thermal and fluid engineering (which made me think for the 113th time whether I'm doing electrical engineering or mechanical), a mentally draining lecture on the same, a canceled movie trip (because the above mentioned lecture got extended for completely stupid reasons), vain attempts to convince certain seriously worthy-of-the-mental-hospital faculty members about an even more ridiculous mini-project group formation (the details of which I'd rather not go into), and some bombed technical work, at the end of which I was positively screaming with hunger and want of humanity.

Enter- Above-mentioned poor guy. :P I'd forgotten a couple of papers I had to photocopy with him, and I also wanted a brilliant bakra to rave at about the day's disaster! ;) So we decided to meet in the evening (I had to parcel up a Cadb as bribe :|) at this garden place near his home. Half of the evening amiably passed off with me shouting at him because he forgot the papers yet again, him shouting at me because I forgot everything anyways, a blessed call on his phone (during which I polished off most of the cadb, I'd paid for it after all :D), and a perfect relationship that I coined between 'poor guy' and our TFE lecturer that scared off a couple of bats from the nearby trees. (Yes! Aint revenge sweet! :D)

The real turning point came when the park started emptying and a couple of those people who're neither here nor there but come asking for money from everywhere (yes yes, you got that right, genius! The word is eunuchs :|) came up asking for, well, money. Well, it so happened that PG (typing out poor guy every time is a pain...) had very recently just given me a substantial amount of money from his pocket and now he sat happily on the bench telling them he was as much in need of money as them! Thankfully, they left us alone without putting us to much trouble, and that was the last time I checked to see if my wallet was still there in my back pocket (I have this very peculiar habit of carrying my money in a guys' wallet, and not in a typical purse like girls do, it's so much more easier to whip it up and pay than all those complicated never-ending buckles and zippers in a purse!); but they heated up our idly hanging conversation so much that we never realized when the place closed down for the day and we got up and were by our bikes saying goodbyes, and I happily went off, thinking of how enjoyable the evening had been. And it was not till I was ringing the doorbell at my house thinking of how hungry I was, that I put my hand in my jeans back pocket, to find...nothing. I instinctively put my hand in the other pocket, and the only thing that came out was my handkerchief. Of course I couldn't lose my wallet, it had to be somewhere, I've just put it somewhere else, I told myself. I calmly checked in my bag- nothing. In my jacket pockets- nothing. Windcheater- a couple of bills, and...nothing. Went down and checked in the inside of my Scooty- nothing. Then came the panic- I didn't have my wallet on me. Why the hell was my wallet not on me?!? And where the hell was it then?? I was up the stairs and bursting into the house in two seconds flat, frantically calling up PG, who answered the call in a sleepy tone. In five minutes, I'd shaken him out of all hint of sleepiness, made him gobble down his usually-slowly and deliciously-savoured food, and begged him to rush back to the place, hoping against hope the parking lot woudntv'e closed down too.

Those intermediate twenty-or-so minutes from when he started from his house and reached there and camp-searched were some of the longest minutes of my life. Einstein would've jumped into the Pacific to quote my example for his blessed Theory of Relativity :| I couldn't go myself because my license was in my wallet, and my wallet was..poof! I couldn't sit there twiddling my thumbs because had I twiddled them any more, I would've ended up with broken fingers. I couldn't walk around because I would've definitely kicked and broken something in the house for want of kicking my own stupid self. I couldn't even trace the wallet back in my mind to where I could've lost it because I'd never checked for it after the garden incident... Poor guy wasn't poor guy for me anymore; he was my last ray of hope to somehow miraculously discovering a rich, fat, lost wallet in one of the most crowded places in town. :|

I literally pounced on the phone when it beeped again, after what seemed like a lifetime. He hadn't found it in the parking lot. The park had closed down. On an instinct, it struck that it might have just slipped out from my pocket when I had checked for it inside. He suggested checking early next morning. I suggested NOW! But the park had closed down, he insisted. I wanted to say, jump off the garden wall and go, you fool! :| If I could just see that bench once... there was nothing more in the world I wanted to see right then! Luckily, just as he was leaving (and inadvertently relegating me to a sleepless night), someone came over and asked what was going on. Turned out there was a tiny gangway out of the park, apart from the main gate. I was ready to fly to the place! PG went off into the dark (cursing probably). He was giving me live updates on the phone. It was funny and stupid and terrorizing all the time. I couldn't just help dreading the moment when he'd reach the bench and find nothing and my tiny ray of hope would be blown off. I wanted him to reach there and not reach there at the same time! Nothing on the path, he said. My heart twanged like a giant elastic band. I'm near the bench. My heart was in my mouth. Two minutes of silence, and then a reluctant voice, 'I've seen under, over and all around the bench, anu! It's not there! You've lost it I guess...'; and suddenly, my heart was not there at all. There you go, I told myself. Congrats for being the biggest pea brain in town, girl :| My hunger had died. I thanked him for all the trouble and was about to set the phone down when there came a strangled 'Wait!'; couple of quick footsteps later, there was a huge 'Found it! I was checking around the wrong bench! It was beneath the one next to it, the one where we sat on!!' Poor guy seemed like some heavenly angel then! I vowed never to make fun of him again (let's see how many hours my vow holds on :P) Rest ahead is the usual story, 'take care of your belonging's and 'thank you's and light rebukes and a hearty, relieved laugh at the end of it all; and needless to say, I ate and slept very well last night :)

All said and done, instincts and prayers and mind-power are some things, man. They might be baseless in science and logic, but maybe that's just because we still haven't been able to discover the trivia behind them. Or maybe, I'm just stupid, and trying to find an excuse for my stupidity ;)

'Wall'ing off for now!

Fue the Flu!

Man! Even I want to go and watch Kaminey and then brog (brag on the blog :P) in full kaminey iftyle about its brilliance and the way I got all its twists and turns and the portrayal and go ooh! and aah! all over the famed charlie lingo! I've read at least 3 complete reviews on blogworld in the 15 minutes of internet access I've gotten today till now. Everyone around doing that and me stuck at home is so not fair! Grr! Bloody airborne pigs. Made me go around to 3 cinema houses today, only to see them all deserted. Someone just go sue(r) the fwine flu, will you? :(

TO B.E. OR NOT TO B.E.

Question (by a very agitated old man, in a very agitated little tone, to a bunch of friends, yours truly included): What do you intend to be, engineers, or clerks?

Answer (by a very amused AB, the most outspoken in the group): We prefer being clerks, Sir, because Indian engineers are nothing but roadside mechanics. [:D]

Reference: "Indian engineers are merely roadside mechanics" -Kiran Karnik, President of NASSCOM, Feb 15, 2005

The world will never be the same once you've seen it through the eyes of...

...Forrest Gump.

Watched it a couple of days ago (thanks to an insistent friend). A Tom Hanks-starrer from the middle 90s. At first glance, the 6 Oscars that the movie clinched would seem a wash over. Put in one line, the movie is the most non-happening one you'd have ever caught. It was only while looking up the Vietnam War did I learn that it was one of the stormiest and most meaningful phases in American history. But not for Gump. The filmmaker enthrallingly manipulates historical footage to accidentally present Gump at many significant events of the time, and many because of his own actions. Even though he doesn't realize their significance. He gets to meet the President three times, he's the man who exposes the Watergate scandal, he's at the school doors when Governor George Wallace tries to get some Negroes into a white school, and so on and so forth.

The movie is about one simple man's journey through life. Surprised? The people around him dictate his life, but not so. He's stupid, but not so, naive, still, not so. The only times he ever loses control is when he thinks Jenny's being misbehaved with. His ability to run like the wind gets him inducted into the college football team, where he excels; post-college graduation sees him in the army, where he displays unnerving valour, rushing into the for(r)est countless times to rescue his fellow men, he excels again; war-wounded, he unexpectedly has a tryst with ping-pong, follows the first and last line he's ever known about ping-pong 'Never, ever, take your eye off the ball', and excels again. The only things he ever knows about shrimps are the never-ending delicacies that can be prepared from them, from his best friend Bubba in the army, but he becomes shrimp boat captain when his friend dies and, well, excels again.

So what's special about Forrest? Regardless of his intelligence, he has learnt to discover simple truth in life, that all the others around him miss. A struggling Lt. Dan stares on helplessly as Forrest, with superhuman strength, tows him away from death. He loses his mind when he sees his legs being amputated and blames Forrest for this miserable fate of his. He feels every one has a destiny, and his was to die a hero, not to lead a crippled dependent life. But years after, when he's Forrest's first mate on his shrimp boat, he realizes (just as we ourselves do) what Forrest taught him. To keep living life, at all costs. Forrest doesn't suffer humiliation, because he doesn't know the meaning of it. He's not afraid of death, so he can snatch himself (and his loved ones) out of it. He listens to others, but chooses his own. What makes it misleading is that most of the times, he doesn't want to have any particular choice of his own.
Forrest's specialty lies in his simplicity itself.

He lives in a world that derides him as stupid but, as Mrs Gump says, "stupid is as stupid does", and in this movie it's the other characters who seem to engage in acts of relentless and tragic idiocy. All through this Forrest is the constant: intent on doing the right thing. In this movie it's not Forrest that's retarded; it's the rest of the world.

The acting is strong, the narrative is compelling enough and its semi-documentary style direction is consistent and provides clarity and pace. The movie leaves one intensely aware that many of our problems are because of our higher intellect, which, ironically, makes us know what we're missing, and in turn, compels us to crave for it. Imagining a world where the best-intentioned half-wit could pop up at opportune moments in history, winning hearts, amassing a fortune, becoming famous, is tempting. Sadly, the world today belongs to those who have screwed over someone else to get there - and that isn't Forrest, he's too nice a guy.

WHY

...is it that when you sit down to write random thoughts, you never get a single one, no matter how hard you try to extract them from your snooker of a mind?

...does your intellectual rationalization of pain stay only till you are not left alone with yourself?

...does power make it feel deliciously content for people possessing it to wield it, just for the sake of wielding it?

...does your strongest point let you down in the most unexpected of places, but probably where it's quite verily needed?

...can people never live up to what they preach?

...do they preach?

...does there have to be a substantial difference between public opinion and professional?

...do your friends' takes on you matter, over your own? Or, do they?

...do you lose all known power of communication when...(Wait! Is that what's happening to me right now?)

...does having lunatic thoughts that you know no one could know you're having give you insane pleasure?

If you had to choose between Innovation and Joshi Vadewale, what would it be?

P.S. The privacy and limitedness of the last question are such that its technomics won't make more than a handful of people start. And even those who did might just give it the slip.
PPS: Those who weren't meant to get the last question can ignore the PS too.

The Mathematician

Today, I happened to come across a post about JVK ('the legendary pune engineering graphics guy', as the author says :D) as I was blog-hopping, and the only person who came to my mind when I read that last tribute-rendering line 'miss those classes' was another legendary coaching class guy, N.M. Kulkarni.
You wouldn't find a cutter Puneite who doesn't know about NM, and you'd rarely find people who haven't attended his classes, most of them would probably tell you with a regretful face how they couldn't be under the wing of the great NM because they stayed in some far flung area and couldn't find means of transport. And you thought you'd never see a day when you'd see students falling over each other to attend classes :|

The guy taught Mathematics. 11th and 12th grade. He didn't teach it, he literally etched it onto people's minds. His trademark ishtyle of pronouncing zero as jheero, his unique quality of seamlessly transforming complex calculus formulae into self-made tunes, the way he banged the front door (if you could call it front, it was more of in the middle of the room :P) on the faces of guys who came running in late, the dreaded pointer that fell like lightning on potent mischief-makers, all the memories mesmerise! All the back-benchers had 2 traditional brand names: 'chaavat', and 'dambrat', the closest word in English would be naughty, I suppose. Which doesn't come anywhere close to conveying the relish with which he used to utter the word, at least 7 times in every batch. I was lucky enough to be in the cream of batches, M*, which I later on realized contained the most scheming of people, it goes according to the ancient law which says, the more intelligent you are, the more the urge to do more cunning mischief :P

Probably the only guy on earth whom God grants more than 24 hours in a day. What else would you be inclined to think when you see someone managing six 12th batches and two 11th batches every day (with extra timings for almost every batch on Sundays) round the year, each batch that went on for a minimum of 1.5 hours, apart from online night coaching classes to enthusiastic students across the states? And this was 2 years ago, i don't have any idea to what 2 digit number it must have increased to today! The guy eats, drinks, walks, talks, plays and sleeps maths. Each of his dialogues are straight from Incredibleland; 'chaaaaavat!!', 'Khanvilkar, distance formula sang!', 'ata apan thode sundry sums sodvuya...they're not very difficult, but they're the sums examiners will ask in exam, so we'll call them sundry, kay bolnar apan tyanna? sundry!!' (this was our introduction to sundry sums :P), 'thiiiiiiikay!' (where we all used to yell along with him, the most awesome style of ending a lecture I've ever seen till date), Each batch contained a minimum of 200 people, every one in the class had fixed places, 10 people cramped onto every bench meant for, well, 10 if you sit the way we used to sit, 6 or 7 if you want to sit in a way so that you'd be able to recognize your body organs after 90 minutes. And then when Miss Electricity used to ditch us during the hottest part of the day, Namya defended the situation only the way he could: 'Tumhi ikde shiknyasathi alela ahaat mulanno, ani shikshan he kathin paristhititach hote, mi tumhala ithe mast AC ani basnyasathi sofa lavun devu shakto, pan mag upayog kaay??' The way we used to shout 'Walve, walve!!' (the guy who used to teach physics in the opposite building), and the booing at the feeble attempts of a meagre 50 people trying to shout back 'NM' from there, and then his mock-serious line 'asa nav nahi ghyaycha konacha...tya walvencha ani apala kahi sambandh ahe ka!'; to the occasional straddler, that affectionate 'tula sangu ka tu kasa ahes? goonda pravrutticha..' :P, the twinkle in his eyes after demonstrating how to solve a difficult sum, and then, 'hya sumchya pudhe tick mark karun liha, YENARACH!', 'ha sum khup sopa ahe, pan mi sangto, ha sum tumhi chukavnarach!' (lol), and then, when he's too much in the mood, 'Aaj apla xxx kay chan distoy nahi..', and then looking at some girl in the corner..'kay mhanata yyy..khara aahe ki nahi..' and then the mischievous laughter, and the class goes all oooh and aaah; 'mi roj midnight la yeun problems lihito boardvar', once he comes into the class and says 'I have two pet dogs', and while everyone is staring, he continues 'their names are derivation and integration' (!!), then during Diwali, 'When the world will celebrate the festival of lights, we shall celebrate the festival of I.N.T.E.G.R.A.T.I.O.N', his imaginative punishments, his sudden outbursts of philosophy, the outrageous anger on certain other (but rare) occasions, cracking non-veg jokes without blinking an eye in front of a 200 strong teenager crowd, followed by 'Majhya ani tumchyamadhe shevti farakach kay ahe!' in that laughing tone; the hours of standing beneath the building chitchatting with friends, till a frustrated NM shouts out from atop to vacate immediately; I miss all of it, ALL OF IT.

It wasn't just a coaching class, it was a place for refreshment. He could be as strict as a teacher should be, and at the same time could effortlessly extract humour out of any statement. True, he's a bit crazy, but then, all geniuses are :D Nothing deterred him, or his faithful students, neither the incessant complaints from the surrounding societywallahs, nor the threatening looks from his wife when she came to visit during 5 minute breaks between consecutive batches, neither holidays, nor diseases, nothing. He was a man for his students. The huge ever-increasing, never-ending queues for admission under his wing year after year stand testimony. I can go on and on and on forever about this guy (anyone who's been taught by him will!), and he's probably the only reason why I would want to go back to my 12th. Any student who gets into junior college and has Maths as a subject should definitely attend his classes; in fact, volunteer for the subject just so you can attend his classes. He'll breathe Maths into you as effortlessly as, well, breathing. It's something I just can't endeavour to put into words, you have to be there to experience it, it's the stuff of legend, the days that'll make you go 'Gosh!' when you recollect them.
Thank you, N.M. Sir.

The Name Game

I recently noticed that I automatically associated almost all names of people to a particular nature. Like, Nikita meant plump, Ameya meant full of attitude, Tejas meant fair. I didn't know where this came from, but coming across a girl named Nikita who was waif-thin made me feel surprised for a bit. Now, I realize that these preconceived associations come from long back, from my schooldays. School being the first platform where you start socialising and making friends, staying 12 years with the same people had sort of given their name an identity, rather than the other way round. I was so used to Nikita being fat that even after breaking out of school, the name Nikita always meant plumpness, and anything otherwise initially felt strange, if not outright impossible, just like thinking of a subdued Ameya was like thinking of Sachin Tendulkar without a bat.
Fortunately for my current friends, not many have the same names that my school friends had. But those who are unlucky enough, shall continue to be the silent butt of jokes in my mind! :P

'Phone'menal

My friends will tell you I keep swinging my mobile phone in my hand almost always unless I'm driving, and more often than not, gravity embellishes its presence as plastic meets mud with a dull thud. But this incident hardly commands any interest in the circle anymore; the only thing that happens further on is, I bend over, pick up the phone, dust it off, and continue the swinging, along with the conversation that I was having with the people around. Apart from these highly frequent ground-cell meetings, my cell phone has once fallen off a moving vehicle (at 40kmph), tumbled down thrice from the tops of tekdis, plonked into muddy water at the panshet dam (unintentional) and soapy water in the shower (intentional), and has had curd and lukewarm coffee spilled over it (which I'd washed off using liberal amounts of water), and yet, it continues to display remarkable perfectness in all of its limited functionalities, except mixing up text message contents into one another, creating funny combinations.

Congratulations, Nokia, for bringing out such a destruction-resistant mobile phone, for making me choose it 2 years ago, for making me despise losing things on purpose and for making me not absent-minded and so not losing it not-on-purpose, and for ruining my chances of getting a more envied model for the next 2 years at a minimum.

Quote of the Day

"Maths is so strange, yet so logical!"
-My 14 year old brother, after a gruelling session of 9th grade maths (during vacation time).

The Dark 'Knights'

This is what is called the 'never say die' spirit. Or something like that.

KKR v/s CSK at Centurion, 18/05/09
It wasn't a match that turned heads. Wasn't one that would make even the tail-lines of the TOI. It's just what you can do even if it doesn't greatly matter whether you do it or not. Yes, even with a lazily-filled stadium booing at you.

The Kolkata Knight Riders threw the match into fire and then snatched it out of the lapping flames. They needed just one dark horse, and they got it in the form of Bradley Hodge. I'm not particularly fond of the team (though it's being owned by SRK), but yesterday's match sure made me eat half the cushions in the hall! I just happened to read a match preview two days ago that declared, Is Kolkata lucky enough to win against Chennai? FTI, if KKR could've broken out of their notorious reputation of throwing away comfortably winnable matches in the last over just a bit earlier, they actually would have made the semis. The guys were a lot clumsy (a trait that cost Hussey yesterday), but what made this chase near-perfect was that it wasn't just some madness coming off. McCullum and Hodge selected the bowlers they were going to target, took it easy against Murali, and later found a Saha to prop up the main act.

They played a little for their pride, and a bit more for coming back into the next season positively, and although it rarely looked like they played to win, they did that handsomely against the second best team in the running!

Cheers, as usual!

To all ye sloths - The queen is here

They always ask me how do I manage to make through the tiny gangway sandwiched between the park and the society hall with my bike (Scooty Pep+), when better riders refrain from doing so, for fear of ramming into one of the walls.

Though attributing it to my miraculous sense of balance would've been more dignified, the actual answer is extremely less so.
I just am too lazy to leave hold of the throttle.

MY HANDWRITING ROXXX! :D

Rocks full on!! Can't expect anything sleeker, sexier and more mature. And if I xerox..err, photocopy it, I would sit drooling over the print till it got dissolved. It's amazing how photocopies make even the most disgusting of handwritings look quite a bit decent. Maybe, it's the ‘printed’ effect. Or maybe, the pre-conceived idea that printed work looks more dignified and professional than handwritten ones. Whatever. I just pray I don't eat up my notebook one day! (On second thoughts, it won't matter much :P)

As a child, my parents used to sign my calendar or homework (always complete, the author would like to mention that she was a very obedient child, quite unlike her adult version), or write my class teacher a sick note, or a wrong-dabba (meaning anything other than poli bhaji) note, I always used to wonder how they succeeded in conceiving such a carefree, casual, half-the-time-unreadable-to-me-but-miraculously-interpretatory-to-the-teachers (or maybe they just faked it!) handwriting. Now, I know.

Curiously, my own handwriting used to change every time. Every minute. Every line. At the top of the notebook, it used to be geometrically at the middle of the two lines provided, but touching neither. And there, it used to be cursive. (The author claims that she still has her Geography notebook of grade 6, with neat little notes on Zulu dances and Assamese stilt houses and the snowy Taiga and Tundra regions, as a souvenir to her volatile handwriting.) Then, quarter-way through, I used to get a sudden inspiration to go print (the all separate letters style). The sentences used to stay exactly between the two lines, but the letters could get free and stretch their limbs a bit; the legs of the ‘p’s and ‘q’s lengthened, the ‘g’s and ‘y’s got their curled tails stiff and straightened (how about a dog? :P), the dot of the ‘i’ got hollowed out, the ‘o’ went from clockwise conception to anti-clockwise, and some completely cursive letters like ‘f’ and ‘k’ and ‘r’ got image makeovers.

But, again, all this held on just for another 7 lines. My pen remained dissatisfied. The last few lines were a mixture of cursive and print. The most user-friendly handwriting till date. Efficient and time-saving. The haven of a lazy person :D Depending upon the word, the ‘s’ would sometimes be print, sometimes cursive, at other times, a cursive version of print. The ‘t’ would sometimes have its cross extended, sometimes it’s a**. And after all of this, ultimately, the next page of my notebook never used to resemble any other page in it! My mum used to say, I’d be caught one day under charges of forgery. My ready retort: I’d show them such mind-boggling on-the-spot samples of multiple handwritings that they’d pull their pen out! (Bad pun, I guess. Err…sorry. Pen. :P)

But all the same, my writing used to be elaborate and pearly and rotund and neat. Y’know. A different sort of neat. Meaning, it looked manipulated sometimes. Carefully planned out and scrutinized handwriting. Although it was not. And I hated that illusion.

Then, in an effort to make it seem more natural, there came a stage where I became too lazy to write. The writing became too short and stubby. The necks of long letters became so short that the ‘h’ started resembling ‘n’ and ‘d’ got mistaken for ‘a’. For the first time in history, I lost marks in my English examination for SPELLING MISTAKES!! I was so scandalized, I came home and cried. :|

I decided, that’s that. Time for some serious business. I needed to shut out all the namby-pamby wishy washy nonsense of neat, clean, scratch-free handwriting (Although the author does not expect anyone who knows her to believe, she wants to make known that she used to religiously tear out pages that contained as much as a single scratch with a slide-rule, and write them all over again. Forget assignments or projects, normal class-work notebooks got that sort of treatment :| ), and be natural. A few cuts won’t take your life. And neither can you afford to write every alphabet so flowery and grandiloquent every time. It would only be so much before it started deteriorating or I lost patience. And it was seriously coming in the way of my speed factor. So, I let it go. Let my inhibitions go. Break free. And I realized something wonderful.

That when you do something without worry, and unnecessary tension, you probably do it the best way you can do it. My scratches dramatically decreased! To almost one in ten pages! I stopped worrying about completing journal questions and assignment essays in draft form before making them fair. I inked them in directly. And fared out top every where. Around 9th grade, I realized that I wrote more comfortably with a ball-point pen. Fountain pens always left patches of ink round my nails. And my fingers looked permanently painted. And the Headmistress found it the perfect time to reveal (although reluctantly; she believed in water-based liquid ink and only water-based liquid ink) that we were allowed to give our Boards in non water-based liquid ink. So I switched to balls. Eeks, pens, I meant. Erm, never mind. :D

Professors always swore by my writing. Now, they went berserk! In fact, our Hindi miss, Miss Sonali, even went to the extent of tagging it prernadayak (inspirational). I was embarrassed. [Note: If you’ve actually got through till this point and such level of self-centered naïveté, then the author strongly recommends you to plough on.]

Experimentations led to the conclusion that black ink suited my writing more. Lent it quality, and a kind of sleekiness. Or maybe it was my mindset and there was nothing of the sort. But I’d learnt not to worry about that, just do what my mind says is right. I never looked back.

Nowadays, almost all my notes are in black, though I have one blue Parker refill as a keepsake. (more so, for emergency situations like exams!) My writing has a sort of casual messiness to it. Joint somewhere, crooked somewhere, completely random. The way it suits me best. People say, a person’s handwriting reflects his/her personality, among so many other things. People also say my handwriting is lovely. I don’t know what exactly to make of those two statements (since I don’t think I’m that lovely in person), but I feel that, every aspect of a person (may it be as small as his way of tying his shoelaces or as big as giving a presentation) that makes others stop and think (even for a second), is worth nurturing and developing. It might not make an inch worth of difference, but who knows? Maybe, tomorrow, the ill-informed author might just get preferred for a PR post in Siemens (at which point, she rushes forward to assure that she has no personal contacts or relatives or friends or friends' friends or grudges in relation to the said organization), just because the interviewer was a person who believed that handwriting reflects personality and who found her writing lovely. :)

Knock on wood.

How three misplaced screws can screw you up equally well...

One long canvas bag.

Three forgotten screws.

Biting cold.

Saturn.

Murphy's Law.

:|

The insomniac author, for once, has all of the time (because of the insomnia), but no inclination to elaborate. Wildly formulated theories are welcome; persistent grilling is not.

Yours threadbarely,

me.

:O

Star parties always hold different meaning (not exactly; I couldn't think of any other flattering introductory line :P), especially when you're gonna be towing your own telescopes! Dunno why the one taking place later this day made me skim back to my last post on star parties. And rather unexpectedly, I realized something completely unrelated to stars. That, till very recently, I still wrote mostly for others. But now, I write only for myself. The conventional style's breaking away, the urge to write goody-goody falsely flowery things getting replaced by the satisfaction gained by twisting off-the-rocker things into catching shenanigans. Calibrating nonsense actually requires a sackful of sense :D

Hopefully, I'm improving.


P.S.: This almost turns out to be the shortest post in the history of the blog.
(To self:) Be ashamed.

Why do I DON'T?

Pre-read note: The over thinking syndrome that the author keeps catching/that keeps catching the author at intervals, followed by frustrated, flimsy reproductions in Microsoft's Office. Don't bother to bear with it.

It's a question asked out of a pure, overwhelming feeling of unable to perform. A loser feeling. Out of a desperate need to be accepted and acknowledged and admired and taken notice of. Of being 'wanted', if I dare to sound cliche.

It's a shameless emotion. As if you are allowing yourself to be relegated to just what others think and understand or can think and understand about you. It's utterly shameless, but still everyone gets that, somewhere, sometime. Some, many times, in this world where you try so many times to live only for yourself, by yourself, but don't succeed. Y'know, just like, sort of victimising yourself in your own imagination, and then braving it out to a glorious end.

A guy who knows equally well as his colleagues, probably even more, but doesn't have the confidence to place it in the open. 'Confidence comes from knowledge', somehow, falls out of place in this case. Language problems. Or intimidating friends. Encouraging group, but crushed, buried deep within self-confidence. Inferiority complexes galore, whatever little he speaks gets stubbed too, in time. Psychological inertia. Keep on moving into the dumps.

I've always thought that emotions are more potentially lethal weapons than Gold AK 47s, just like the mind is stronger than the physique. If you lose control, the 47s at least leave remnants.

The worst has passed, you think?

No.

Contentment in that very state.

A person who says main aisa hi hoon, and not main aisa kyon hoon? (Heartfelt apologies, if anyone actually managed to read to this point. Couldn't bear leaving that line out :D)

A person who thinks I don't, but not Why do I don't?