Mind Games

Introspection

2010-12-09T22:59:00.003+05:30

Why do I do the things that I do? At times, why doesn't my mind have absolute control over every nerve in my body? Why do I let go and Why I don't? Why do I react the way I react? Why do I even react when I should just interact? Where is my calm centre? Gut feeling is good but a poker face is better. Why do I reflect melancholy when I should be in jubilation? and I learn I haven't ceased to surprise myself!

Jai Ho! St. Valentine Ho!

2009-02-10T22:48:00.009+05:30

A new marriage bureau has been founded. The Ravan Sena is a charitable organization that has pledged to marry couples on the auspicious occasion of St. Valentine's day accomplished with the help of priests and rituals held with full fanfare. Recent events following the announcement by the sena chief regarding their mighty pledge has spurred an expedition of unmarried couples from all over India to invade Bangalore, the garden city, where the vow is proposed to be accomplished. Some excerpts from the interview with the chief, Shri Pram Pubaholic, "We are a devoted organization with a noble cause. We have been funded by the gospels of charity in Vanuatu and support Polygamy and Polyandry. In an attempt to pursue and implement our noble ideals, we have proclaimed to marry off as many couples as possible on St. Valentine's day. Since we are a newbie in this field, we have restricted ourselves to execute our vow only in the Bangalore city for now. According to the set guidelines of our marriage bureau, any two people of the opposite sex found looking, conversing or even breathing within a distance of two feet from each other would be joined in holy matrimony with full fanfare. Along these rules, any shopkeeper, postman, auto-rickshaw guy and the like should be wedded to their customers before they can carry on with their daily trade. Similarly all the people in the offices, educational institutions and public buildings should be married to each other. The only exceptions are children below 12 and gay couples as Ravan sena seriously believes in the un-conditional love of a gay man to his single, devoted partner. We are planning to accomplish this mighty feat on a single day and hope to enter into the Guinness book of records and consequently enter into the ET awards' "marriage bureau to look out for" list. "

Following Mr. Pubaholic's speech, a record number of couples have already encroached the bus stands, ccd's, malls and even book shops of Bengaluru, getting ready to utter "I Do". Padma and Salman, a couple found alighting from a train from Gopalganj in Bihar said, "Our parents had fixed our marriage but Salman's parents asked for 53 cows and 78 chicken as dowry. Papa sold our neighbour's well and managed to get the dowry but he did not have any money left for our wedding ceremony. Moreover Salman's family had already eaten all the dowry. So we both planned to elope and get married. But we are a righteous couple and wanted our marriage to be recognized by the society. So we chose the Ravan Sena over the other marriage bureaus and have come here to Bangalore to get married."

The single and no one to mingle with brigade has also entered the throngs of the city. A Spirited Siddharth, holding a Diageo beverage in purple haze, was heard saying, "Yo man, I wanna get married. All I need is Change. I have trotted all the way from London to get united with my dream partner. The Ravan Sena is really doing a cool job. All I plan to do is to spot some hot chick, develop a conversation with her and call out for the Ravan Sena. And then the wine shall flow! burrrpp"

The media has responded magnificently to the Ravan Sena's valentine mangalyam andolan. The sena has managed to grab the mind spaces of a whole nation in a matter of a couple of days. Mr. Pram Pubaholic says in response to this tremendous success, "This was part of my start-up initiative for the B-plan competition of Nutan School of Management. My base venture is the marriage bureau, followed by version 2 - New Party marketing metrics in popular media and consequently, version 3 - Seperate state demand." On inquired about the choice of the name, he replied, "We chose Ravan Sena as a tribute to the Great Ravana of the epic Ramayana. Ravana was a master-mind and a brilliant political manipulator of that age. His country and people were in dire need of labour to work in their plantations. Ravana realized that a surplus of labour was available in the main-land and to acquire them he needed to build a bridge connecting the two nation states. The smart entrepreneur that he was, he contrived to minimize his efforts and maximize his ROI. So he thought out-of-the-box and kidnapped the mainland chappie, Ram's wife Sita in his Garuda airlines, knowing very well that Ram would follow him to Lanka. Ram and his monkey troops built the bridge across the two nations which also enabled the migration of labor across the seas. Now the successors of the laborers are claiming their identity and call themselves LTTE. Though there are many groups involving in human-chains and even self-immolation for their cause; Ravan sena is the only group that is showing interests in the forsaken cause of the sucessors of Sugriva and the monkey troops. Everybody else thinks only about humans. We are the only ones who are voicing out the pleas of the monkeys to claim them back to our mainland." The Ravan Sena is definitely re-creating history with its lofty ideals. "Pram Pubaholic. May his tribe increase".

The Kalashnikov Tribe

2008-12-26T00:41:00.008+05:30

Now what could be the connect between the title and this picture?!! No raised eyebrows here, please. I have gone nowhere near an AK-47 ever and i'm mostly harmless. This picture was taken on one of my last few days at BITS-Pilani when my wingies and I had planned to go on a "Pilani-Darshan". We were roaming around the roads and the bylanes taking in the rustic flavour of small-town India. Impressed by this lady's glowing gaiety, i gathered to stike a pose with her. The moment was captured and later forgotten too. Now back home, while sifting through the numerous folders in my hard drive, i chanced upon this picture and what struck me now was not the lady's exuberance alone but the Bold writing in red on the walls - "ABVP". I was surprised that Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad was prevalent in Pilani too. As a part of the BITSian community, I can safely vouch that most of the students at BITS-Pilani comfortably detatch themselves from any sort of political activities and even the students election is a pretty lackluster affair with no political affiliations whatsoever. Then where did ABVP come here. Well, of course there were these other smaller colleges at Pilani meant for the local populace. Apparently those students have had an active participation in these student organizations' activities. Now the ABVP seems to be raising its voice over a worthy cause of illegal Bangladeshi infiltration in India. The organization had mobilized more than 50,000 students in a rally at Kishanganj this month against illegal Bangladeshi infiltration and demanded to completely seal the India-Bangladesh border and put a check on infiltration. It claims that there are two lakh Bangladeshi refugees living in several slums in Jaipur posing a danger to the national security. Now the cause seems plausible as these slum dwellers have long been awarded Indian citizenship and make their livelihood doing petty jobs in the city. They are using up the resources meant truly for Indian citizens. Coming to the aspect of student organizations in India, there is a commendable number with each political party having its own student wing (And as we all know, the number of political parties in India is of course uncountable with a new party coming up almost every week). Most of these student bodies are turning out to be violence inducing ones in the young student's minds. Take for instance the case of the students of Dr. Ambedkar Law University in Chennai who had fought pitched battles over the contents of an invitation for a political event, attacking each other with sticks and iron rods. How could students be so cruel? The inlaid political involvement and casteism of these students has actually spurred violence in them. The Madrassas in Pakistan have also been associated with breeding armies out of young men and providing fighters by imbibing them with cruelty and violence from an impressionable age. The Bajrang dal is India is also no less. I had read the book - 'In Spite of the Gods: The strange rise of modern India' by Edward Luce last year which had pages of illustrations denoting how the Bajrang dal were training the young men to be warriors to spur violence in the society. The motive is all political and there doesn't seem to be a tinge of social benefit or upliftment as these organizations claim to work for. In such a scenario, who said that there was hope in the next generation? We see war everywhere. We have our own neighbour - Sri Lanka, which is fighting the never-ending battle with the world's most notorious terrorist group, the LTTE. It has armies being trained for violence out of small children. And in Mumbai too, the man you see in the newspapers yielding the AK-47 in the Chatrapathi Shivaji terminal could easily be mistaken for any other college student on his way to catch the next train to his college. The only difference is the Kalashnikov and the unrepenting cruelty. Who knows, he could well be a part of one of these so-called student organizations for social upliftment. Bah, Humbug! And while there is this kalashnikov tribe, there is another.....the one which witnesses these events with passive emotions, voicing out loud invectives, writes blog articles and returns back to watching Tropic Thunder on DVD print.
Gen Next??!!!!!!!!!!

Welcoming Obama

2008-11-06T01:13:00.003+05:30

The title is the name of a burger at Pupil's off bessy beach. And this was on their menu three months back when i first saw it. That clearly shows how much his win was expected. So what is all the surprise about? yeah, everyone is fed up with gush anyway. Why bother a clone? and so change is happening. And the change doesn't seem too positive to India anyway. What with gush's nuke deal and the whole of NCR and bangalore shivering over the prospects of hiking the tax rate of off-shoring companies in the US of A. So this is a call for OUR government to resort to change. Before we see a more inflated rupee and an unemployed India. Before it's too late...

The Pain of Innocence

2008-09-28T22:27:00.004+05:30

Poets have mourned for centuries on the loss of Innocence and whole nations have been blamed for the loss of Innocence. Yet the world succumbs before the truth that Innocence and Humanity cannot coexist. In spite of all those verses preaching you on Innocence, it never was a virtue and more so NOW. Sanity pleads before morality, yelling out 'Let me go. Let me abandon my Innocence with thee. What use is it to me apart from being the source of unfair affrontry and a dead weight around the neck?'

The mere evidence of its presence in your kith shrinks your soul and brings you untold pain on the realization of what pain it is about to engender him, beset by men and hounds. Then why do you still try to hold onto the rope of Innocence that is fraying before your own eyes, to keep from falling into the abyss of reality.

Knows: Dear, Don't trust everyone. They might deceive you.
Not Knows Yet: Ka, What does deceive mean?
Gulping in air. Ah! He doesn't know. Why, God?
Knows: Dear, deceive is a harsh word. It is something like. see, your friends might be with you all the time when you are having fun but later on they might leave you and even forget about you. deceive is much more than that.
Not knows Yet: But MY friends will never leave me.
Knows: (Sadly accepting the pain): Yes, Dear. Your friends wont.

Let it remain so. I shall try to preserve it until i can.
And thus the world spins.

Currently Reading

2008-09-28T21:49:00.010+05:30

FURY - Salman Rushdie

Serves as a vent for my own fury that has bottled up inside me for sometime now.

Excerpts

Rome did not fall because her armies weakened but because Romans forgot what being a Roman meant. Might this new Rome actually be more provincial than its provinces; might these new Romans have forgotten what and how to value, or had they never known? were all empires so undeserving, or was this one particularly crass? Was nobody in all this bustling endeavor and material plenitude engaged, any longer, on the deep quarry-work of the mind and heart? O Dream-America, was civilization's quest to end in obesity and trivia, at Roy Rogers and Planet Hollywood, in USA Today and on E!; or in million-dollar-game-show greed or fly-on-the-wall voyeurism; or in the eternal confessional booth of Ricki and Oprah and Jerry, whose guests murdered each other after the show; or in a spurt of gross-out dumb-and-dumber comedies designed for young people who sat in darkness howling their ignorance at the silver screen; or even at the unattainable tables of Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Alain Ducasse? What of the search for the hidden keys that unlock the doors of exaltation? Who demolished the City on the Hill and put in its place a row of electric chairs, those dealers in death's democracy, where everyone, the innocent, the mentally deficient, the guilty, could come to die side by side? Who paved Paradise and put up a parking lot? Who settled for George W, Gush's boredom and Al Bore's gush? Who let Charlton Heston out of his cage and then asked why children were getting shot? what, America, of the Grail? O ye Yankee Galahads, ye Hoosier Lancelots, O parsifals of the stockyards, what of the Table Round?

Rock On! Rocking....

2008-09-04T15:44:00.008+05:30

Rarely do we get to watch a movie based on rock music as the prime theme and for a country plagued by masala flicks and aging superheroes, Rock On! comes as a refreshing whiff of fresh air, bringing out the flavor of Indian rock music. This is the story of four friends who dream of making the greatest Indian rock band ever but circumstances lead them to break apart vowing to never return back to music to complete their dream. After 10 long years of failed music careers and forgotten relationships, a chance meeting leads them to come together and rediscover their friendship and relive their passion. The gigs, the music and the lyrics make us go totally gung-ho over it.

The four guys start out with dreams of making it big in the world of music and they form a rock band "magik". They win a rock competition owing to Their natural talent and originality and so are entitled to make an album for their rock band. Conflicting egos and demeaning circumstances lead them to break apart and forget their dreams. each of them goes his own way, vowing to never return back.

Reposing on the lack of life in her marriage with Adi, Sakshi wishes to bring back Adi's past as a rock singer and with it the happyness that he lacked as the suave investment banker. Adi does not want to confront his past and his failures, the memories of which he had carefully restrained in his mind. After Sakshi leaves him stating that their marriage too was a compromise for Adi, he decides to face his other self and revive his friendship with the other band members. The four meet and they realize that they cannot give away their passion after all. The jamming sessions at Adi's place brings out their raw talent and also their friendship. They decide to complete their album and after many set-backs, they do finally fulfill their dream....

The scoring point of the movie is the intense emotional content and the complex relationships emoted flawlessly by the actors. Farhan Akthar brings out the actor in him by his apt reactions with no excess frills and unwarranted sentiments. Arjun Rampal deserves high commend especially in his violent upsurges against the director and more subdued as a failed musician in the later half. Having seen Purab as the irritating VJ earlier, he comes as a complete surprise, fitting perfectly into the role of the spirited drummer and the happy-go-lucky gujju seth. :P Luke Kenny plays the low-key, forgotten keyboardist, disgruntled with his own life of composing pieces for second grade music directors.

The ROTFL scene is the one in which the band performs at a typical Indian wedding!! Other look-outs-for is Purab's loong beard plait and Arjun's long hair (sigh!). Overall, the movie was totally smashing!!

Zebra Crossing!

2008-09-02T16:15:00.001+05:30

GREATS!

2008-08-08T10:23:00.001+05:30

Where do I fit in here?!

Judgemental? Not guilty.

2008-08-04T00:37:00.001+05:30

There are three kinds of people.

Great minds discuss ideas.
Average minds discuss events.
Small minds discuss people!

- Eleanor Roosevelt

HIGH ON LIFE...

2008-08-04T00:26:00.000+05:30

Thoughts nouveau, Ideas, elated senses, witticisms that make you go 'ouch', fondly etched memories, stolen glances, peals of laughter, the comfort of loved ones, a pang of desire for the unfulfilled vow, the need to know, the over-powering emotions that resemble an overcast sky about to burst into a mighty storm, the spark in the eye, the sudden unsettling of the self on realization, the euphoria on the aftermath, the power of control, the freedom.....to LIFE.