P. G. 's WoodHearse

My first Haiku

2011-07-17T03:19:00.000-07:00

Live music is so cool

So European, so streetsy.

That is, if it's any good.

Hi, shut the noise, neighbours!

Err..

2011-06-28T11:50:00.000-07:00

I simply have no clue what to write.

You see I have undertaken to write this post, so helpfully titled 'Err', in the same spirit as one might sit down to do an English Composition Exercise.

There's a chap called Edward Lear. He has written a book called The Complete Book of Nonsense, and one suspects he did so under the same circumstances as mine. I own, I am quite sure, the only copy he ever sold.

Well, I got that out finally.

What next?

One can hear some birds right now. And whooshing cars.

If I turn my head by approx. 85 degrees, I can see a pale blue sky and a row of pretty houses. If I could have extended my neck out of the window, I would have seen a road disappearing into the sky.

The birds are sounding so happy.

Hmm, Yawn, Yabbidy-yoo.

Maybe some other time, then.

Crime and Punishment

2011-04-29T00:39:00.000-07:00

The whole point of writing this post is to

get the last one out of sight.

That last post-check it out- it has this one unwholesome pic of one shoe perched on one dead leaf and the gravel around it is turning grey in protest.

Or you could be wiser, and help your cursor migrate to the top-left where it's screaming for.

I know.

Way too much free time and all that porky stuff. But fine reader, your having made it to here speaks a lot about your intrepid attitude and mettle and also shines some light on your having nothing else to do. Same boat, lovely reader, same boat.

Happy Hols.

Dawn Treader

2011-04-16T04:59:00.001-07:00

One fine day, the idea of hunting up one's camera may crop into a head. Heads, especially temporarily insomniac ones, often have such fudgy ideas that turn out to be surprisingly good.

After steadily prising one's eyes open and appealing to shaky knees for co-operation, it is time to set off. There is something about the possession of a camera and having breathtaking nature around that makes one feel one is living the National Geographic life. It is still dawn, that mostly unseen hour of the day,by the time the morning ceremonies are resolved and one has stepped out.

Pale light peeps groggily through the treetops. Not many people are about and the buildings around quiver helplessly as you break into a merciless rendition of Everywhere you go, always take the weather with you.

At this point, several milkmen, newspapermen and restless hens are bound to exchange glances with each other. This is because this peaceful time of the day belongs, by an ancient, never-questioned dogma, solely to them and to keep them in humor, one must never overdo civilian acts of the noontime, like shout too much or throw plastic on the road.

" Hello there!" cry out bright poppies to passing early-birds.

No wonder the legions of milkmen, newspapermen and hens unite to keep out trespassers. They just cannot bear the thought of wasting Hello's on others.

Meanwhile the changing light dances all across the sky in a seance of its own, transforming everything on which it falls into a thing of magic and wonder.

The Library looks good in the morning, the Senate looks quite captivating too ( I have an opinion on how the Notre Dam might look in the morning too, but let's stick to the R-land campus). But the prettiest place here has to be the path leading up to the Baddy Court.

No wonder they blame poets ( who are most active at this time of the day)for sounding so completely loopy. It is tough not to be loopy when flowers beam back at you, and if there's a breeze about, wave as well.

"So what?", an interlocutor on the behalf of the 8 am waking party may interject.

"All that is very well, but sacrifice those final, sweetest moments of sleep that come to one from 6 am to 8 am- you must be mad! "

It is impossible to bristle at that dim-witted objection if one has partaken anything from the peace of the early morn. Other problems might prevent you from speaking up eloquently about the beauty of the glorious hour like an alarmingly high rate of yawns.

The day from then on transpires mostly like this: smile a smile of peace at your suspicious newspaperman, stifle another yawn, sets off for class, change mind mid-way, return and proceed to hit the sack.

Post-TS, Post-Modernism, Post-It, Post-errrr....../And so amid bad jokes, I finally make a post...

2011-02-19T09:27:00.000-08:00

Poor blog. You nearly died.

But luckily for you, they put that absolutely shitty business called Design Exam and I had to think of you. That's how God plays, I am getting it. What a fellow, what a fellow ( God, Jeez )

So now. If there was a contest called Describe-your-design-exam-experience-in-two-words and if I felt like participating, I'd probably get disqualified on the spot. For both, mouthing expletives and crossing the word limit.

Yeah? well ? whatever never mind?

But seriously. What would even Kurt Cobain himself do if he was made to sit in a design exam?

He would surely either

1.pull the strings on the T-pulley and make music
2. die straightaway of Aneurysm

I know. He'd do neither, he'd just switch tactics and implore one and all to rape him and they'd let him off. And yet clever people like him end up with a crazy wife, bad advice about taking dope and shit like that. And we're talking about KURT COBAIN here.

I should clarify here that I am not saying he was God or anything. He just sounds like one. A Disappointed God. And the reason I'm discussing him at length is to procrastinate bringing up the topic of the Design Exam, since it has undesirable repercussions on my liver and well, right now, I really am into valuing health and all that. OK, the egg-jam then.

The teacher, seeing whom in the early morning directly affects your aesthetic senses, shows up waving a yucky Problem Sheet.

The Problem is always dead boring and by the time you're struggling to read Line # 2, a thought is running in your mind in parallel: why should I do this? why should I become an architect. I hate buildings. If I don't become an architect, I will be jobless and if i become an architect, I will still stay more or less jobless.

This is a difficult net of thought. Line # 3 and # 4.....#2568 hardly register. But after a while the truth stabs you. Oh yeah, you have to design a commercial complex.

Butterflies besiege your stomach.

Un Grande Marche. A little better. Designing Un Grande Marche sounds so much nicer but that's only the Gaul coming out of you ( If not Kurt, it's Cacophonix). At this point the average Drafter picks (i) his tools if he's in a I-Am-Because-I-Draft kind of mood or (ii) his nose, if he's totally doubtful about his stand.

Well, whatever, never mind...
Three hours later, only an hour has passed. The draftsman in question ( in rhetoric, rather) has passed out completely. While the clock hands tick around tiredly, let us leave the draftsman to his rhetoric and let me speak up in my defense of Why I nearly got you killed, Dear Blog.

It was the winters, Dear Blog. It was the Lack of Net. The lack of space in the room to, you know, actually SIT so one could write. And the other shitty things...

No we cannot go on. As we speak, our Chief Hero the Draftsman is rubbing his eyes and waking up, only to discover that he is, at present, sleep-typing this post.

God-dammit, so the Draftsman wasn't a he, all this while. Stupid gender-biased profession title, I tell you...

I am so glad I wrote this down. It's a nice post and full of deep meanings and poetic connotations. And those stirring bits about nature ( see: butterflies).

Will be back , possibly too soon for your own good, Dear Blog...

HIGHWAY TO HAIL

2010-12-26T00:11:00.001-08:00

Snowflakes are such bloody show offs. Like, okay, winter IS their personal theatre and they have every right to dance and pirouette and grand jete all they want to before, literally, coming to earth. But bloody hell, is it too much to expect 'em to have a little consideration for other things that would like share some air space with them. Like ruddy AIRPLANES.

"Ahem ahem", coughed my conscience, an absolutely hateful creature with the disposition of that crackpot Zimbabwean despot. " You have never really SEEN snow...you shouldn't judge like that......

....... ABWZEBMI!!" it yelled, staggering back, as I drew an( imaginary) icicle through its heart.

Back to the sniffling old snow. Yes, now, you. I don't care a frigging frigg if you plan to take Moscow, Paris , or Toronto by storm. But I warned you before: NOT the land of Rockefeller & Co, NOT...errr...Nouveau Pierre. We didn't need no cancelled airplanes. Honestly, don't the hearts of snowflakes ever MELT.

Sigh. I returned after that barking session with the Hounds of Hell, to deal with the NOW. What a shame! And I had actually started appreciating winter for once, you know, noting the prettiness of the fog, the spells of winter sun, the drama the least bit of red or yellow or purple bring in when it peeks out of all the dead colors. Even enemies appear appealing. Like even the sadak ke mad canines transform themselves into things of wolverine elegance in their dog-jacket haute couture.

So I had warmed up to winters considerably before news arrived. That it was snowstorm season in NY=> CANCELLED FLIGHTS.

I kicked my toe, bruised it and switched off Hey Soul Sister- it was making me irritable.

One can't kick one's toes more than ten times so one really has to think of new avenues. Averse to suggestions like clean your room! do something! turn off the TV!, I got experimental. I snooped into unheard bookshops, waded through their most doubtful literature and came back triumphantly clutching The Joy Of Lazing.

" This is my code of life! Every word of it! Look- The authors are even PhD s! This is genuine stuff! " I pointed at the book defensively as eyebrows around shot up. The eyebrows fell. The couch would be legally mine! I thought noting these signs of affirmation. The TV, mine, mine! I had very well located the Lost Scrolls! Screw going back! " Liberation" I cried, flipping through the book in glee.

Mid-flip, page 85: Eat Less.

In the background, my conscience conducted the chorus . Ice, Ice, baby. You know what the literal translation of it is in Hindi. Barf, Barf...sure, give me a basin.

The Great Gag in the Sky

2010-12-01T18:30:00.000-08:00

Monster in the Backyard

It caught you, chased you down finally. And now the monster is laughing, its eyes are bloodshot, it is mad, raving mad and there are a hundred things running in your mind that you could say to make it see sense, if only it could listen.

It is a funny creature. It grew in your own backyard, did you know that, thriving on the very stuff that you wanted to get rid of, the stuff you threw out because you grew so sick of it. It chose for itself a friendless corner and there it grew, unseen and unsuspected. It grew against nature, it grew on death and decomposition, shunned by the sun and spurned by other backyard monsters.

Come on now. There are no monsters! It must have been just a bad dream, some psychedelic shit.. I say while you’re at it, throw in some junkie Euro music in the background! And some dark, moody lighting too!

The monster is laughing and your skin begins to crawl, such is the irony of its laughter. It sounds like a hundred thousand dying men crying out of agony. Of course. Hasn't it learned everything out of all that you tried to unlearn. Everything you tried to destroy, burn twice over and bury into the bowels of the earth. And even as you dug the graves, the earth-devils snickered. Like we'd keep your secrets!

And now ghosts! There aren't such things AT ALL! It's all in the frikking mind...

But without a brain or a motive, the pathetic little monster wouldn't have lasted too long. It was senseless, cold, dumb. But sinister forces were already afoot, and it was a matter of time before they discovered the soul less creature and possessed it as one of their own. Evil took root and spread out all over it, giving it something to call flesh and blood. The backyard had a monster.

Gloom. Failure. Disappointment. Revenge. The monster ate into the pile of rubbish that you had left lying in the dark reaches. And out of it, it fashioned itself a new brain, its own system of reason. An outrageous brain! A brain like a swamp, a thick, airless, stubborn world that rankled without reason, that knew nothing but malice and hatred. It couldn't process information, it could only drag every unfamiliar thing into its depths till it became one of its kind. It putrefied beauty, it suppurated courage. Wherever the monster went, it spread doubt and devilry, it haunted you to look into the dark recesses of your mind that you had long since shut.

Alleys

A metal chill over your shoulder. The breath of a steel blade? Thick darkness that feels so solid, you could be running into someone? Drafts of dry wind. One couldn't even fly out of this..

And then from the other end of the alley, framed by unreal blackness, emerged the Monster.

I would have to kill it but the real trouble was it's flesh and blood was mine. It's blindness was mine, its wrath was mine and it's death would be mine too. I hesitated. I had to kill it! I waited for Fear to consume me, but even terror came teasingly, lazily, taking its own time, enjoying watching me tremble. The ground seemed to turn into a bog, and it pulled me in but not fast enough for me to escape the Monster. I had to kill it! I forced my eyes open and willed myself to look at it hard. It had funny eyes..cold and dead..eyes that were turned inside out.My fingers curled automatically towards its throat, white and shivering but determined to do their job.

The monster flinched.

It lies limply at your feet. Take it with you. It's not a monster, its only a scarecrow, a harmless home-made scrap. A doll dressed with the odds and ends of your worst fears. Its eyes look so vacant now. It was only a lifeless sleepwalker.

Take back its remains, all the junk that is so badly rusted and distorted you can't even make out what it had originally been. Take it back with you and bury it well this time.

!

2010-11-01T13:10:00.000-07:00

" Oh, Fish" I said, not for the first time in the last several weeks. Then I went back to quiet contemplation and general racoonery.

" Huh."

" Yikes"

" Crumbs."

" Bliff."

It really doesn't help to throttle your thorax into saying too much stuff. Words are a lot, lot of crap and it is better to invest energy in better things, like thinking of short, staccato replies.

A quiet " Bliff" can pack quite a lot of sharp disapproval, if voiced carefully so as to end the second 'f 'with a pleasant sonorous ring. " Huh" is not even a word, it's like a puff of air. Used too often, it suggests bovine dumbness but the true artist accompanies it with a casual sneer and an appraisal of the heavens for effecting a classically condescending finish.

Music, now. Music is better. It's OK for people to sing words to music, because the irritating inflections usually dip into the melody and then return to thrill and enchant. I am not against lyrics.They are usually beautiful, pretty words woven into the language of violins, pianos and guitars. Often when the music ends, the lyrics stay behind. Journeys need an accompaniment of music, especially if there is a lot of tooting traffic on the way.

But the best is the sound of trains through a foggy, winter morning. A feeling easily shattered by the rasping of the railways announcer, but still full of promise and adventure.

Brain sounds usually spell t-r-o-u-b-l-e.

Eric Clapton sounds melt the soul. Lady Gaga sounds smell of mold ( not really).

No way I can segue this into a mircalously meaningful conclusion. Blog's been lonely for a while and I thought a stiff dose of nonsense might cheer it up a bit. That's all, and oh, Bliff.

Some Random Things

2010-09-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

The moon rose, sped across the skies and then disappeared slowly into the paling sky.

Like Always.

Yawn, morning arrived.

Like It Always Did.

Yawn, class at, yawn, 11 am.

Some Vague Lecture.

Yawn, class, zzzzz...., lunch, zzzzz, class...

And the day died and the moon set its gears again.

If the World was someone's TV, someone was into repeat telecasts. And it was one dull, dreary show they were watching.

That is until the Monkey thundered into the scene.

And then - a cat! And then, the ghost of a mangy cur. And the tooth imprints of a rat. And the wintry chill that only a snow leopard can bring with it. And the quiet silence of the sloth bear.

Oh yes, all of a sudden there's Wildlife in the hostel, prowling unexpectedly around corners, dragging into the stony walls the trails of the wild, an air of tense excitement and promises of unpredictable adventure.

Now, the Monkey is one after my own heart. He owns the following:

1. a broken left leg

2. a shocking appetite for anything remotely edible

3. a permanently blank expression that passes off as deep and philosophical

Next to turn up was the crazy cat. The crazy cat is a regular spitfire. It is completely ignorant of social etiquette and hobnobs with dustbins and thinks of ways to eradicate mankind all the time.

There is also the Ghost of a Dog, spotted only at the Witching Hour, sniffing hungrily at dustbins( probably they smell of the crazy cat)

There are rats too, some reduced to ghosts after guzzling over mess leftovers.

Out of the above fauna, only the Monkey is worth striking up companionship. There were talks about making it the Wing Counselor but this peaceful primate didn't come down from the roof for a whole day as a mild sign of protest.

And the cat is plain evil.

What a clever post, indeed.

P.S: All the above characters are NOT fictitious and anyone who lives in the same wing and doesn't know about all this is living in the thralls of danger and doom. Seriously. Dogs. Bite.

The Mystery of Quincy Public Library

2010-08-24T09:40:00.000-07:00

What, one wonders, in one's moments of extreme joblessness, happened to the Quincy Public Library. I use the word wonders and not thinks because I mean to. Thinking is too deep and philosophical an art and doesn't go well with squashing flies and scraping paint off walls ( something I was doing by the side as I wondered)

Like I said. Whatever happened to the Quincy Public Library.

Did it get the Quinzy?

Did it flood in those parts and affect them so brutally that they had to sell off the rarest of their rare books? Did the Klu Klux Klan get 'em?

Whatever. Their loss is my gain. I own it. The slightly yellowed, sweet smelling, ever so beautiful, First Edition of Pocahontas or The Nonparallel of Virgina by, bless him, David Garnett.

God bless Amazon.com. God bless Pari. God bless Quinzy Library, for being so agreeable so as to part with something so dear.

It was nearly a month ago when I sat, feeling rather wistful, in a Dead ( and Highly Respected) Man's library, sniffing the beautiful library he had reared. I was wistful because I felt a mixture of joy and hopelessness. I was also hopelessly stirred.

You could see it in every book, on every page, that they had had a loving master. And what an exquisite collection of books this master had owned. You could see that this was no Bestseller-reading boor. Every title read like poetry.

My nose nearly grazed the many volumes, as I scanned the shelves, resolving the fine print with uncharacteristic determination. And suddenly my spine frizzled. My eyes froze.

There sat amongst the others, Pocahontas or The Nonparallels of Virgina. Slanting ever so slightly towards the right with a queer, delicate air of its own.

I settled down to Chapter One, ignoring the Dog ( there was one nearby). An hour passed when I shook out of the spell of the book, to come to terms with the baying dog and a passing fly.

Dogs ruin life, I tell you. Flies are no Mother Teresas either. I skipped out of the Dead Man's beautiful library, cursing the brainless beasts and limped to a safer but bookless place and I sat there, lost in dreams and reveries. If the Dead Man hadn't been Dead, he would surely have lent the book to me but the Alive Woman who roosted in his place, clearly had no such social side. She pulled an unconvincing face meant to depict apology and gestured No, Fcuk Off.

But now I have it, Ihaveit my precioussss. Even better, it is the First Edition and to add to its never-ceasing charm, it's got a No Longer The Property Of Quincy Public Library stamped over it. Quincy's a loser, if you ask me. It probably got busted by the FBI for indulging in wrong practices, probably they misused CCTVs and all that.

Most likely- There's no Quincy and there's no book and there's nothing and we're just in a dream.

The Mango Mafia

2010-06-21T22:12:00.000-07:00

Part I
mangoforbreakfastmangobetweenbreakfastandlunchmangoafterlunchmangoafterafterlunchmangoinmydreamsetcetraetcetra
I really like the way Mr. Dahl employs the term 'fruity' while describing sappy stuff, like silly TV moments when Tom is about to propose Angela. It gives me hope and courage that there once lived a man who rightly interpreted the manipulative and trashy nature of these organic infestations, designed primarily for the diet of the fruit bat and the fruit fly.
Whether 'tis some mild delirium that guides me to rant so openly about this insular scheme of nature,that I cannot say. Whether it's a secret craving for processed food, the kind with Italian peppers strewn generously, that too is beyond my knowledge.
All I know is that I am being pursued by the Mango Mafia and there's little I can do about it.

Part II

The truth hit me a couple of hours ago, when my mental cogs reeled out ole Bollywood gangster scene,and in no time I had put two and two together.

'Chausa' , I conjectured, had to be a sort of highwayman ( such a typical name), Hapus the wicked gunslinger and I was damned if Langda wasn't their leader. Had these been real people with the customary gangsta moustache and mole, I wouldn't have felt any more stricken.

Oh, I was shit scared. And that is when I felt compelled to read up on the old deserted case of the Mango Massacre of the 90's. If I had been shit scared earlier, I now felt like a homeless bacteriophage. In an old newspaper I found a bizzare account, told from the horror-struck eyes of The Mangoose, a famed decoit of the past and as I read the bone chilling epistle, my worst fears were confirmed. I must let out the story for confined within me, it torments my system and right now, I'm in the state of one who values health above all.

Part III: Abstruse Mangoose: The Dead Man's Account

I began the Mango Massacre.

I shot down every mango in my sight. Young or old, not one mangy mango escaped my terror. My thirst grew.I began scouting for peaches. I beat the pulp out of oranges. I skinned chickoos. I laughed as I squeezed the life out of pomegranates. I plundered secret hideouts of berries. In my wake, grapes grew seedy and apples lost colour.

The world was rightly shaken, most importantly the scientific community at whom my ire was directed, became helpless. Sans the apple, I knew the ole bearded bozos would be left with only the 99% perspiration and none of the newtonesque inspiration that is required for scientific progress.

Over the time, I quit beating-the-bushes and expanded my networks and skills. Wildlife, I soon learnt, was what the top smugglers were lusting for, and I plunged head-on into this new, fantastic job.

Snakespearbuddy), Ratface, Toad and Limpin'Lemur and me got together to form a formidable team. We supplied the big 'uns the works- ivory, mink, tiger claws. We grew rich and ambitious and in a series of coups, Ratface killed Toad after Toad killed the Lemur and Snakespear slit Rat's neck.

The Mangoes massacre

2010-06-21T12:34:00.000-07:00

It was destiny that led me to throw Snake down the river. Strange emotions welled up as I watched the trusty friend of yore battle helplessly against the raging waters, but doomed is the gangster who yields to the tricks of the heart in its mellower moments. I was now numero uno, the bane of the jungle and beloved of the big'uns.

But going solo meant that the work got lonely and doubly dangerous. Often my resolution would flicker, and my soul fell to conflict. I could go back to becoming a teacher. My villainy would stay masked, forgotten in due course. I would be a tyrant, yet an accepted citizen.

One day I could take it no more and picking up my rifles, pushed off into the depths of the jungle. I was determined to end these useless, rambling doubts. I was a hunter and my job was to be unforgiving and cold. I was a predator. My blood worked up as I wandered deep and far; the smell of the wild excites the true predator and makes it a thing of demonic savageness.

I spotted two shining lights in the dark. A black velvety bulk stood outlined against the heavy darkness of the night. It was a panther. With infinite deceit and pain, I rounded the panther and felled it with a curve of my hatchet. The lifeless body slumped and the fire of its eyes slowly dimmed, as if in submission.

In the foliage, I detected little furtive motions. It was an elephant, a magnificent tusker and I soon had it at my feet, crushed like a beetle. I caught the scent of deer and soon enough, the fleeing lot were outrun by a couple of my bullets.

It was the greatest haul ever. I felt drunk, delirious with success. I caressed my fingers, those dextrous, beautiful creations of art.

Every glimmer, motion or unrest in the jungle came to a standstill in my wake. The forest seemed to hold its breath. The wind fell, almost withdrawing from me.
I dragged my haul after me, filling the air with loud, raucous laughter as I thought about my old vacillating mind.

But I should have read the signs of the sudden climate change. I should have kept an ear out for the soft padded steps that were rounding on me.Suddenly, from the thick darkness tore out beasts, of every kind and number and their angry baying and bawling rung through the air as they broke the circle they formed, charging towards me.
All became a furious tussle..between flashes of gnashing jaws, teeth, paws and antlers I dimly fell the growing patter of rain. A storm was aboad.

I woke up. My skin felt curiously pickled and smarted as the wind brushed it but the foremoust thought I had was that I was alive.
I lay in a tribal hut, and who I discerned to be the village doctor, was hovering around.
" He has woken. Put him on a diet of fruits. Only fruits. Fruits of every kind, of every hue , with pith and rind" his voice broke the quiet of the morning as he directed his orders.
A new set of footsteps told me that breakfast had arrived. A bowl of mangoes sat in a shaft of the sunlight, giving me a look of loathing, but what troubled me was the laziness which it dwelled upon me.
An unknown pang of fear went down my spine.
I gasped and clutched at my blanket.
" So it's you. FInally we meet. How ironic, we who could cure you, we who are full of goodness, will be see you to the burning gates of hell." said the mango.
" No, no! " cried I " Leave me! I could squash you! Leave me!" and I kicked at the old bowl savagely.
The bowl tottered a bit and the mango rose out.
" You cannot escape." it said, calmly.
From behind it, I watched with horror as my breakfast closed upon me with the slow, calculated motion of vengeance.
" Spare me" an involuntary note of plea escaped my dry mouth.

The army of fruits parted in two files. A peach walked in.
" Spare you?" spat she, her voice trembling with contempt. She ripped open her heart, and I saw streaks of crimson down the yellow flesh that seemed to burn with hatred." You, who left your dirty human tracks on my great-grandfather's heart."
A huge watermelon rolled up and gave a commanding bellow " Ladies and Gentlemen. It's wartime. Roll out the cannons! Fire the bullets!"

I could scarcely believe the scene. Massive melons rolled around, firing their seeds at me. Bananas left their skins lying wherever I tried to run. Oranges acid-fired at me. A huge jackfruit went flying, ripping off as much of my flesh as it could.
I took to my heels. The ballistic army came chasing me, but even in my weakened condition I knew they could never, ever catch me.

Panting, I reached the shore of the river, ahead of which lay a town. I only had to cross it to escape this madness. I needed a weapon to face the challenges ahead; I pulled at a branch that swooped low over me.

A yellow thing, smooth, young and yellow fell in my hands.
It was a mango.
" I was waiting for you" it said in a fruity, dangerous tone and fell over my neck, smothering me with its sickly sweetness. " Take your own time. There are many of us." it said, with a lisping voice.

Part IV: The remains of The Mangoose were found near the river in a shocking state. His head lay in a pool of crimson plum juice, pulp and goop coiled around him like ropes. And his mouth was found to be open, teeth decaying, and stuffed with mango.

Monsieur Monsoon

2010-05-07T09:02:00.000-07:00

It rained all day tonight.
'Twas an early morning when the rains tried to steal in. But because of the many ghissus up at that hour, the wake up calls went around quickly and the houses and balconies were full of cheers as the first drop came shooting from the skies.

The thunder applauded.

The rain came pouring, unfurling its silvery sheen, its full glory and richness of sound, down onto the waiting trees, the thirsty soil and the outstretched arms. In minutes, the world stood transformed as a certain banana republic of a place called Roorkee bade its minions to the cursed confines of examination halls. Though not even a thing as cross-eyed as an exam can spoil anything that's got a dreamy 'first' prefixed to it. First Crush, First Car, First Rains..you name it!

You just need to jump into the puddles, or lip-sync with a frog or freeze-frame the spiralling droplets and the dreadful hangover of the aweful-est exam goes cartwheeling into the misty horizons.

Rains are magical.
In the sheer audacity of their suddenness, in the bountiful beauty they inspire, in the music they leave behind.
Rains heal. By giving back life to parched land, by washing the dust off old memories, and simply by showing up.
Rains unite. By getting people together over cups of coffee, by pulling out the livelier sorts onto the streets and forcing the hydrophobic ones to stay huddled under shelters.

The leaves must have dried up by now. Just hoping my shoes have too.

So you think you could just be dancing

2010-03-03T05:21:00.000-08:00

The party is on.

Every face is a study in perfect composition: the women wear their painted smiles and the men their bluff heartiness. But when the music begins, light-hearted spirited strains off a piano, a small scar of horror cracks through every mask, for it reminds them of how far away from rhymes and revelries their lives have come.

But they still step up to the dance floor, hand-in-hand with the partners they secretly hate, envy or cheat. And yet they pretend to look at them as if they were in love, because that is part of the whole scheme of their life...doing as the occasion demands.

From above the dance floor, the maginficent chandelier watches, its icy white light a little whiter than usual.

The clock ticks silently but the gap between each hour is slowing.

The witching night has gobbled up half the moon.

As the hours grows late, the grandest of the guests arrive, they who wear their inhuman aristocracies like heavy armors- armors which are meant to be formidable defences, but which themselves turn inwards and chip and nick a little flesh when they can.They are dressed richly, in furs and wild colours but the real difference lies in how perfectly their masks have become one with their skins. Pecking and cooing with false pleasure, they run into familiar faces- old affairs, friends they duped, fellow millionaires they secretly conspire against but their painted smiles stay just as wide.

Ofcourse, every now and then a sharp, jealous glare slips out unbidden within the sea of impersonal greetings, but this is a ugly, naked breach of conduct and no one acknowledges it.

Now the music slides into a wild, feral romp on its own. The pianist appears to have gone missing, the piano seems to have walked by itself, to a chamber upstairs.

An invisible finger trails down everyone's spine but they try their best to keep guard. Sip wine and play-talk, wading through the thickening atmosphere with a set stubborness

The grander guests kept their high-handed hauteur and the lesser mortals their chilling courtesies. Not a face has yet betrayed the horrors that are wrecking their insides, the strong grasp the wind's hand suddenly has made on their very throats. Because acceptance would be defeat.

Until the unexpected guest walks in.

Hippies Don't Lie

2010-02-21T06:18:00.001-08:00

'Twas Theoatmeal.com that sent me into the depths of despair all this while. How could I even poke the issue of randomness with grandmasters like Mr. Innman around? Utterly hopeless, I had given up this-is-so-random and drifted to lower crafts like drafting and rendering,well, at least in my dreams.

I wasn't the only one having troubled dreams.

The Troublemaker had a dream about her past life. That she had once been Christopher Columbus, the chosen one, the great man who never let the wind go out of his sails, the intrepid traveler who introduced his companions to the wonders of scurvy. She regaled tables, chairs and a few walls who were ready to listen with how travel was the only ambition in her life.
Meanwhile, the Beanstalk lost her mind and her heart and bravely masked this great tragedy by putting up her autobiography in installments through periodically updated status messages.

So it was a nervy and twitchy audience that the Troublemaker had, when the Beanstalk and me accidentally caught her in an impassioned " Why the hell won't you ever move your a*ses out of Roorkee? " kind of speech. Beanstalk burst out and declared- " ALL RIGHT THEN. Tomorrow, the land of Rishikesh it is! You can do whatever you want to - hog, amble, raft-
NO!
@$%^##%!
Why the hell would I say draft!"

Which is how we found ourselves ensconced in a bus, still rubbing our eyes, on a trip that we decided to improvise as a food trail. Since ambling sounded suspiciously bovine and I firmly put an end to any discussion on drafting, and also since two out of us were consummate foodies, we decided to go as on-the-job gluttons.

...And it was heaven. It doesn't take long for one to come under the sublime spell of Rishikesh, and nothing can ruin it, not the supersonic roar of the auto engines, not even the charging cows, not the jostling crowds.

While we stuck to our hogging plans, soon food wasn't the only thing on our minds.

Hippies.

Don't Lie, Look Awesome, Are completely at peace, Come only in One's or Two's and are God's Gift to the Opium Industry.

And now it wasn't only the Beanstalk who had lost her heart.

Their faces are unusually unlined and carefree. They spend all their life in pristine unwashed glory. They provide home to stray birds in their magnificent coiffures and they can make a raggedy cloth ,that a non-fussy mechanic would scorn, look like the most elegant line of pret wear.
A hippie will think nothing of squatting by the curb to read a book, something of the nature of The Tibetan Book Of the Dead. A hippie will revise yoga postures in the middle of a cafe. A hippie will, more often than not, be accompanied by a thick cloud of smoke. A hippie will walk hand-in-hand with mendicants and write on how beautiful and divine the beggars of India are.

Hippiedom is the pinnacle of pointlessness, what they call nirvana. It is a sublime state of existence, where soap, comb and sanity are shunned, where laziness is but a way of life..

???

Where was I?

Something about on-the-job gluttons. Heaven. Mystical.

I was mystified into the world of magic stones , as a cross-eyed shopkeeper showed us a memory-reviving stone. I would have liked to buy an entire (double-strung) necklace of those stones but the Chief Treasurer forbade any investments in anything that wasn't edible. FOCUS! commanded she, and we treated our intestines to an interesting mix of pancakes, pasta and deserts. The Troublemaker refused to eat at one place unless we sat in the view of the river and this being neatly overruled, a killing silence followed that made me fish out The Tibetan Book Of the Dead for advice. Anyway, from where we ultimately sat, we had a good view of an Italian hippie, resplendent in a lungi, who referred to the waiter as 'You- CHINK!', and thus restored us to good cheer.

But all good things must end and soon we were back on the jolting ride home. Back to the 360 acres, back to a Monday, but back as sworn believers of the hippie cult...

Aloha!

Season 2

2010-01-20T03:28:00.000-08:00

Officially it's spring. The sound of sniffles, sneezes and prolonged snoring will soon be replaced by more musical notes. Swishing trees and twittering birds and suchlike ( though of course, it is no longer necessary for one to be a birdie to twitter) Yes, spring is on the move and let us hope that the wool has not reached uptil our eyes.

Winter has been a slow time. The library clock, in fact,gave up waiting for it to pull up at 8:40 one day. Several other clocks also decided to call it a life . The one in my room however insists on being the maverick of the Clock Kingdom and keeps ticking to glory, smug faced. Stupid thing should join Enid Blyton's crew. No music, the bellow of an alarm, even if 'tis spring.

Speaking of spring, one's conscience might hesitantly try to put in a word about spring cleaning. That is a wonderful thought and a very pertinent one too, especially since it is only by using the most sophisticated of GIS tools that I could locate my only remaining clean sock's twin. Of course the missing twin had picked up a couple of piercings and quite a tan on its vacation so the other twin denied recognizing it and soon a sad song that K-serials save for dying/rebirth/slapping scenes filled the room.
And then suddenly spring happened and well, it was Season 2. Stay where you are, we'll be right back.

Frost-Byte

2010-01-13T07:08:00.000-08:00

Initially this post was supposed to be a parody on the Six Concepts, a die-if-you-haven't-read-it kind of architecture essay, by Bernard Tschumy ( and go die if you haven't heard of him ).
However my optic nerve refused to have anything to do with the essay and also passed the unfair judgement that Tschumy talked gibberish, and also that Six Concepts was itself a parody.

The post could have taken shape much before, since the world is not short of gibberish ideas but then there cropped up another obstacle. Something far more personal, even physical.

Frosted Fingers.

Beglove 'em, burn 'em, boil 'em, they're still bound to turn a bitter blue if the winters in your place are bad enough to trigger Penguin Sighting Expeditons around. Mummify them and they may turn a putrid green. Other rainbow colors might show up if you explore other sciences of frosted-finger prevention.
Those sciences are crap, I learnt when one faced by this terrible affliction and so this post was put on hold for an indefinite time.

Now today when some unexpected sunshine interrupted the grey weather's miserable run, I felt defrosted enough to put my fingers to use. But fingers, one learns, show a large amount of hysterisis or they probably like to stay stuck together, so all I could manage was some random WHAM!!!! WHAM!!!! on the keypad. And so this post came out to be...

When one skims through it, one can almost sense an undercurrent of coherence through the jumble of random alphabets. Can you? I am fascinated by how that bored WHAM!! WHAM!! session could produce a couple of intelligible words. In the middle of this experimental post, if you search hard enough, you'll find TWO words which can be spotted easily in any Archaic English Dictionary. WHAM, WHAM ofcourse. To decode the rest of the words, try the Pox-ford Dictionary of Gibberish.

Infact, Tschumy might have chanced upon the same happy discovery too. Master of everything that he was, he might have got up and danced on the typewriter keys to roll out that gobsmacking piece of work- Six Concepts- that was hastily lauded by critics worldwide, before anyone could mention actually reading the sticky essay.
Magical, it feels, to be sharing a century-old secret. And also glad, that one escaped nearly burning one's retina in pursuit of reading the Arbit. I only wish that you, dear reader, could say the same!

H-EAR-SAY

2009-12-22T21:56:00.000-08:00

'It's that time of the ear' , rang out a warning on the radio. 'This New Ear..' spelt out an ad, in red letters. ' Want to make this New Ear Really Really Big?' asked a stupid female in some booze ad on the telly.
I sat up, eyes saucer-wide with shock! How could they take it so lightly, how could they think of night-long parties and soirees in the midst of these all -important nation wide alerts?
"' 's Matter?" asked my long-suffering M.O.M, not at all impressed with the state of utter ruin my room had fallen into. The phone began to jangle in the other room and M.O.M turned to go.
"MOM! Can't you see..all these things..telephones and all.. ARE NOT IMPORTANT ANYMORE. Mankind is done for. We are all dying..Hey, You can't just GO!"
She just rolled her eyes and exited, leaving me alone to deal with this catastrophe.

A New Ear. Sounded like a highly tumorous affair. I could take in a few bacteria, but THIS would be the pits. Dubiously, I checked my head for any growing appendage. There was a small wart but it was too early to predict what unearthly thing it might transform into.
There was this friend at school ( Highly Classified Info), she had this tiny third ear behind her left one. I had envied her then but times had changed, I wasn't sure if three ears were in vogue anymore.

After the morning coffee had been gulped down, and the fog cleared off my mind a bit, things started to fall in place. Oh ,a new year. Nothing tumorous, though it was highly disgusting of December to come and go so quickly and tip us into frosty, vacation-devoid Jan. Old, sepia-tinted memories of Roorkee reeled by..Last Sem suddenly seemed so distant, so far-away. Next sem- Not So Distant. Just a measly ten days more and...
My thorax prepared to let out my hourly sigh (observed to be more punctual than the Big Ben) but it never came out. Because I was busy turning saucer-wide eyed again.

Something had just cleared its throat. Ahem, ahem, ahem.

"This is crazy!", I howled, stricken. I knew I was alone in my room, excepting a few visiting spiders.
That something suddenly buzzed out of my ear and made itself visible. My optic nerve was fair frazzled from the very task of resolving it- it was TINY as hell, luminescent and had wings. Whatever it was, it had to be friendly, because it was waving wildly at me and trying hard to look cute.
" Who? Are? You?" I gurgled.

" An Ear Fairy Am I
Neither Friend, Nor Spy!
Hear Ye, This is the Gospel fact
As I implore, you must act!
You must resolve this New Year
Never to crib ever!", Its surprisingly high -wattage thorax rang out full force.

It was hovering around my nose. Its trying-hard-to-look-cute efforts had long since snapped off and now it sported a furious look. Moody, like all fairies.
Promise." it demanded, in a sinister whisper. Made my skin crawl. And I used to think fairies were in the business of granting wishes.

SWAT! Down spiralled the ear fairy, its wings lifeless. Brave Agent M.O.M had wielded her deadly mosquito- swatter. " Pesky mosquitioes!", she said before rushing back to the ever jangling phone.

A Year-Fairy? Or was it really an Ear Fairy, since ,after all it had taken up temporary accomodation in my ears. To tell you the truth, I was glad it was silenced for ever but then..that was quite some poem ( rock song?) it had belted out, you know...Resolve This New Year, Never to Crib Ever...Maybe it wasn't just trying to bug me. Maybe like all fairies, it had had the Greater Good in mind.

Enteritis The Dragon

2009-12-05T07:32:00.000-08:00

Contrary to popular disbelief, it has now been proven that exams are highly injurious to one's health. Yeah! They gave me the nefarious Salmnonella Typhi! Stuff that does something to your spleen and gives you the sensation of being a saucepan on the sizzle.
Buried under a five inch thick layer of blankets, I dreamt many dreams. Hot, boiling pasta..sinful tiramisu..and then,slowly, like a black shadow loomed into my sight the blasted SP lunch- the REAL cause of all the brouhaha!
I tried to punch down the shadow but it stuck its tongue at me and vanished.

The carnival however truly took off when they began the vaccines. I have had enough needles ploughed into me to make a tattoo out of it. Cute, innit? And a cute intravenous thingy sticking in my vein. One turn of its valve, and hurrah, out floweth the blood.
I got a cute alternate tagline for this post. Tyfried.

Stay Warm.

cribbity crabbity

2009-11-02T06:56:00.000-08:00

One of the top 3 things i hate doing is WRITING. I prefer the egyptian heiroglyphs, thank you. However it is positioned at # 3 with Drafting and Model making grabbing the top honors. I also hate several other things which i am unable to pinpoint.
I like dozing on the couch, with the TV and the stereo simultaneously in blare-mode, one eye on a Wodehouse, another on the telly..and preferably the comforting crunch of a cookie resonating in my ears.
Sadly, Roorkee is no couch-potato's den. Cruel, piercing sunrays wake you up to another day of drudgery. You shunt from one place to another, in vain hope of a yielding prof cancelling his class..only to troop out of his class four hours later, using the T-pulley for support..
BeWigged sets us off to survey the godamned Roorkeescape in the blazing sun. The Wobbly Man shakes his head with calculated disdain, when we enter the class at 9:01- one minute past the official time. And the best part: We are not spared the gospel knowledge of Quantum either. Add to it the interesting angle of crackpot despots teaching us how not to build a house. A stint here, and the Taliban would renounce their weapons and take up knitting.
Agreed. Cookiecrunching and tvstereotwotiming are luxuries beyond the realms of non-royalty. I mean you are supposed to slug it, if you want to turn into a Steve Jobs. On the other hand, NO, slugging is a purely personal choice. You don't slug for The BigWig or the Crackpot Despots at the beck of their bloody fingers. As a principle, i am anti-rebellion because you can always shut up and bear it. But my principle is already straining under the first of the 42.
Cribbing, they say, is a hypochondriac's first stage. But think ye, where would Pink Floyd and RHCP be without a little cribbing.

Mountain Do's

2009-10-27T11:59:00.000-07:00

Finally, Blogger.com catches me in a contemplative mood. I have always wanted to write a post that would fire up the waterworks in the reader's eyes. And so it is today, that I give up jackassary, demon worship and relentless pursuit of arbitness in search of higher emotions- beginning with contemplation on the delicate aspects of life. Starting with Food.

You don't want to read this if you want to preserve your body fluids. Drool, mostly.

WATCH OUT trip, Sunday the 26th: At the crack of dawn we trooped out of the Bhawan even as the first rays prepared to start their 8 minute journey to earth. Deprived of morning coffee and breakfast, I was desperately low. This led me to consume a certain super-saturated sugar solution, sold as Coffee by the Marketing Division of Bus-T In Mussorie, someone comfortingly remarked, we would get awesome food. For it was to Mussorie where the 17 early-rising WONA folk decided to head to.
The coffee sloshed in my innards merrily as our bus twirled and pirouetted across the mountain roads. Everyone responded rather differently to the ballerina moves of the bus. Some nodded off, some like me stuck their necks out and drunk in the beautiful view ( with the steadfast gaze of a pigeon), some turned green with sickness.
A final grand jete and the bus threw us out. Into Mussourie, the land of breathtaking views.
Mussourie is a lovely hill station dotted with confectionery shops, expresso machines and ice-cream parlours. It understands the growing appetite of its tourists very well and as you walk up the Mall Road from the Bus Stop, the density of eating joints grows in delightful numbers. Anyone with the fatal Chocolate Deficiency Disease will find instant cure in this heavenly abode.
The smell of roasted coffee beans, bittersweet chocolate and of rum-raisin whiffs fight for space up your olfactory machinery as you walk by. Shepherding us was our Great CheerMan, who seemed immune to the intoxicating caffeine-scented air. Immune and impatient.

Ah, caffeine...
[Citation Needed]
The historic goat-herd beat the Zero-inventing Indian Nerd to the Greatest Discovery, when he stumbled upon the magic coffee bean. Lore has it that his goats went for a change of diet and grazed on some unknown herb. The goatherd went bonkers when he saw the herb transform his usually lazy goats into active, lithe and frollicky creatures.. So he went and sold his goats, pocketed the capital and started his own chain of expresso shop, which we all today know as Costa Coffee.

Every calorie of the chocolate binge was required when we took a detour from the plain path and took the primate-friendly path, negotiating precarious footholds, slippery gravel and itch-causing plants. Successful in getting ourselves lost, we also stumbled upon some ruins. Of course, death lurked in every move we made but what better place was there to die than this untramelled sliver of the mountains. Poignant yet timeless, deserted yet alive, Steep yet inviting.

I was still thinking about the very awesome trek or whatever it was, when we returning back. People again walked coldly past the choc shops, the famous Cheese Omelette shack and the expresso shops.
Such a cold attitude towards food comes handy in Roorkee though, especially towards the blistery chap at Happinezz or the Waste Reusal Dept of the Mess. WHEN will the entrepreneur within us open the patisserie we need? When will Italian Dining at Roorkee stop meaning Cheese Pizza at Prakash? On this quavering note, the post draws to its end. Burpbye.

BLOG OF SMALL THINGS

2009-10-03T06:39:00.000-07:00

PROLOGUE
"With the lights out , its less dangerous ,
here we are now ,entertain us"
called out the Lizard on the south -facing wall to the Lizard on the east- facing wall.
All this in ultrasound frequencies but enough to wake up the tuna coloured semi-corpse from her sleep.

Its been a week Of Eggs, Bones( broken) and Cramp-ets. One still doesn't get whether the insti is pro-sports or not. On one hand they make us guzzle calories with the air of the doting grandma and then switch roles with the pop-eyed, stuffy Grandfather and make us sit for eighteen TSs and nine end-sems. Speaking of pop-eyed and stuffy, he has done it again. Any event of potential joie de vivre continues to get culled at the altar of the One Who Must Not Be Smelled- Monsieur Swine Flu, all thanks to the Pignacious One.
But still hols are hols, and rollicky they must be according to PG's First Law of Strife, Unihearse and Nothing. With the first signs of autumn creeping into the air, and skies turning bluer than usual and the clock taking its own sweet time to tick,numbing pains easily dissolve into endless hours of slumber.
It was from such an endless slumber that the semi-corpse woke up. In stark contrast to her tuna-like greyness, the lizards were green.
Corpse turned white as death as a lizard expertly rolled out its tongue, caught a passing fly and rolled it back.
Burped. (in ultrasound)
Corpse shrieked (very audibly)

The whole room was wall-papered with lizards. Some were shy, some the romantic types, some had forked tails..they waltzed, jumped, hip-hopped..and because with every species, happiness is intrinsically linked with the presence of plentiful food, there were gazillions of insects too.
One insect decided to take refugee in Corpse's ear-folds, another decided to fish for food in her blood-streams. A malicious mosquito dived into her nose. Corpse yelled in terror and then spat out a fly that had entered her mouth.
The Lizard with the Forked Tail saw this. It gave a snarl and suddenly it looked very like Papa Dinosuar, as it lashed out its tail angrily.
With mean intent, it crept down the South Wall to the floor...
across...
Its big, black eyes never left Corpse as it drew a deep breath and launched itself into the air, straight for Corpse...

SHOWDOWN
General Lee grabbed the blood-bottling fly in one limb, the ear-wig in the other and banged their heads into one another. All in less than a nanosecond. Its tongue caught the phlegmflea and crushed it.
Victory! cried out all the admiring lizards on the walls. In ultrasound, ofcourse. Some of the albino-lizards turned green with envy, which was exactly what they had always wanted, so in the end everyone loved General Lee.

In every scene of Good Versus Evil you always have the sulking, stupid dumbass and here Corpse played that part. She turned blue with fright, as Lee did a victory flip. Purple, as he turned to her with beseeching eyes. Dead, as his mates flocked besides him for the victory march.

Which was when P.G Woodhearses(Fine Makers Of Oak/Plastic/Composite hearses, we help you carry back your beloved dead in style) were commisioned for a mass supply. Which is how we know the details of the above story.

cast

Corpse - Me
Lizard on East-facing wall - Some Lizard
he - Sonofabutcher

credits

Music score - What do you care, most of it was in ultrasound?
Director of Action - Quentin Tarantula
Fitness Advisor - The Cricket

My Experiments with the Tooth / Toothpost And Flaws

2009-09-09T08:36:00.000-07:00

Toothache is one of the most hard-to-locate pains in the world. Its not like the ear-ache that can be instantly put to ease with a simple toss of your head. Or the muscle ache that can be only rectified by the very pleasurable task of nodding off.

People never document it but the most ABOMINABLE pain in the whole wild world HAS to be the smarting of the skin-between-the fingernail. You fall prey to it when you wildly hack off some of your precious dermal layer while trimming the nails.

But of toothache, the less said the better (and yet, i dedicate to it a whole post). Its not as vicious and lashing as the skin-between-the-fingernails excruciation. Its not as biting as the ear-ache.
But the Common Toothache can make man live his horrendous most nightmares.

HOW THE COMMON TOOTHACHE COMES ABOUT TO BE
You manifest your hog-likeness in the most obvious of ways, and stuff in one-two many morsels. Your long-suffering belly bears it subservently enough and patiently takes the food in, the mucosa never failing, the colon never refusing...
And you!
Champion Chomper, Gluttonous Gnasher, Monstrous Mincer Of All times merely look around with a self-satisfied air, wipe the sweat off and tackle Level II- the post-meal meal.
That's when the first tremors begin to rock your jaws.

THE TOOTH-QUAKE
The jowl has atlast weakened. The WhizDumb Tooth gives a dangerous creak.
Zooming into the dark cavern of your mouth, one can imagine what the scene must look like. The incisors would be putting up a brave front. The canines would be swinging ominously, reminescent of the buckling chandelier seen in desi horror-movie climaxes.
The grinders would be lying like fallen soldiers, battered and beaten.
To this scene of penultimate doom, you lend the spooky background score as you ruthlessly command the lone fighters to march to the beats of chomp-chomp.

TOOTHSDAY
Toothquake scales up to 9.0 Richter teethtonic hell. You yell, desperate to make the pain stop, and unable to locate the epicenter. You call up the GERMINATOR for help.

THE DEATHLY HOLLOWS
And the rest is all a rather insalubrious matter between you, the dentist, the three deadly hollows that riddle your teeth.

Which brings us to the end of another post that helps Woodhearse buy some time before the dreaded permanent burial.

when you (can) say nothing at all...

2009-08-22T12:35:00.000-07:00

Bypassing any romantic implications the title may have and coming straight to the point, it's getting difficult to brush your teeth in peace and solace.
I am not even talking about the no-show of Coriolis Effect in the collecting ,stagnant waters . Right. Ewww.

Barely awake, I float off to the Confluence of Brushing People and wiggle between million elbows to subject my teeth to the second half of the morning maxim, that is, SHINE. When a certain over-chatty conspirator decides to make the most out of the assembled crowd and hold an early morning Election Poll right there. The poll question that I have to apparently answer is
" Who are you voting for".

I am (literally) foaming and frothing at the mouth and thus rendered speechless, preventing me from giving a fitting reply ( Batman, in this case), and E.C has to back off, disappointed .
Meanwhile I say a silent prayer of thanks to the Tooth Fairies, for early morning Poli-themed conversations are super-bugging.
Poli is not even a welcome topic in the afternoon, evening or night for that matter.

There are other times when one might be speech-deprived.

One is when people breaks stupidity records and coolly and confidently state the fact that a swine is undoubtedly, a type of an insect.

Or when the Prof who looks EXACTLY like a lion tamer ( complete with chinese mafiaesque moustaches and metaphoric whip- weird assignments ) ends every sentence of his with a HA-HA-HA. The HA-HA-HA is not any staid HA-HA-HA; it starts at B-flat 2, slides off into F2 before fading dramatically into silence. Tears, yes, tears stream down as you are bent triple from the task of not being able to ROFL properly.

But it is unexpected news like FOUR STRAIGHT HOLIDAYS which makes the thorax stutter with emotion and manage only a poor WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE in response, that takes the cake for the awesomest speechless moments of the past few days.

Sixty Minutes

2009-08-01T13:03:00.000-07:00

This was the hour that elapsed between 6 am to 7 am (on my birthday) that I shall never, never recover from. It started with The Troublemaker dragging me unceremoniously to the LBS grounds. Barely awake, my poor brain was addled by a string of sweeping statements- discoursed with the air of Aristotle by ofcourse, the Troublemaker.

'We will go back at sharp 7 am.'

'It is so hot.'

'Damn, it sooo very hot.'

'I am hungry.'

Each statement hit me like a vicious bullet. I feebly tried to plug my ears, but the sonic boom was unrelenting. When the killer of the lot- 'Let us take a round of LBS' hit home, I felt my heartbeat shift to a lower gear.

Well, if you would have sent for the doctor then ,I am sure he would have given up the case as one for the 'I'm Still Alive' series. The poignant point was that I would be slipping into my hearse on my very birthday. Agreed -my biographer would have it easier to put down my age as a Perfect Twenty -but it still seemed unfair to me.

I was dying, but I was to come out of it alive

The interesting part comes HERE. . This would be one of those Near-Death experiences for I had slipped into the transient space from where the Dead depart to either heaven or hell.

I had technically zoned out, but I knew I wasn't dead and somehow I wasn't worrying about it anymore. A beautiful song was playing in the background and it was a long time before I snapped away from the music and looked around. I was in the middle of a passage.

It was then that I felt Uplifted. The meaning to Life, The Universe and Everything became clear...the music ebbed away and the passage turned dark even as a blurry symbol appeared at the end of the passage. The suspense rose to a crescendo as the image sharpened and a number glowed in the dark.

42!

Taking cue, a pacy soundtrack began to play and then an imperciptible swish of curtains...and I felt myself thrown out of the passage, hurtling faster and faster, unconscious...

...and then found myself lying on the ground ...I was alive. I had survived.

The Troublemaker insists all this is BULLSHIT and that I had merely fallen down as a result of the kick-in-my-shins she had just administered to me. I maintain my version of the story, feeling a little smug for I, and only I possess the Answer.

P.S.: It was FB that named P.S as The Troublemaker and though not unopposed to the general meaning it suggests, I beg pardon. Besides its ALL a joke.

The End Draws Closer

2009-07-14T00:22:00.000-07:00

P.G's WoodHearse ( established since 1989) is sad to announce that Summer-break '09 has booked a hearse for itself. Undertakers from IITR have announced the day of its death- 22nd of this month.

Not since the demise of Sirius Black have I found myself so completely choked and cut up. Needless to say, its an early, cruel death for these upstanding HolyDays, and allow me a last hearty sob into my kerchief before I read out the funeral speech.

* Background music: Another Brick In the Wall By Pink Floyd*

I am P.G. and I would like to say a few words in memory of The HolyDays.

A whole glorious summer of wallowing in laziness has passed, and it is with surprise that I note that we all made it through, despite the scorching sun, the unyielding rains and The Hangover.
Looking back, the HolyDays fit into the general scheme of 'life is one grand, sweet song'. One could be lazy. One could be greedy. One could loll forever, atleast till one's spine suffered permanent damage.

My brief but beautiful relation with the HolyDays took me to the most breath-taking heights of Joblessness. It was this vast space of time which let me sit for hours appreciating the singular beauty of an earthworm trying to crawl out of the earth after the first showers.
It seems so unbelievably far-away- the day when Shendi ( Agent XAGR8) and I held up Monginis, snubbed a w.h.i.t.e. and snuck off to KFC for reinforcements, ( missing Agent Blonde and Agent BroomSTUCK sorely) and met the Chinese gunman Chu-ha .
This is all I can manage to say, because at the moment, grief has rendered my thorax dysfunctional.

One more week and the green and lush Roorkee will pop back into sight and life will screech out its answer to the meaning of Architecture, Second Year and First Sem : 42.

Vacation excesses

2009-07-02T05:03:00.000-07:00

This isn't my debut on blogspot. It's easily my 5th blog but I hope it won't die an unfortunate death like the earlier ones. A deep sense of foreboding fills me as I write this First Post...
Will P.G.'s WoodHearse escape permanent burial within the reams of other webpages? Will the blogger within me finally resurrect and sort of stick to this irksome concept of self-documentation? I suspect the former but no use worrying...

I planned to go into estivation these hols but Greater Forces objected to my 24-hours-of-sleep agenda. While the lucky half of the animal kingdom ( lizards, bees and the kind) dozed off all summer, I was often made to wake up at SIX AM and face the cruel,blinding morning light. Turned bitter against the homo sapiens species and their belief in healthy habits, I decided to try my hand at suicide driving. So I joined a driving school nearby and for 15 days, Noida shook and cowered from 11:30 am to 12:00 pm as I zipped through its streets and alleys at breakneak speed. Cows hopped aside, dogs discovered wings and people scattered as I ( After Stupefying the instructor) tore past madly.

But gradually, maybe out of no other choice, i began to enjoy early mornings ( the cusp of melting moonlight and virginal sunlight and all that). No use ranting when it's true that there's no time like early morn and so, my attitude towards The Homo Sapiens Species softened.

So did my Road Rage.

Now I am recognized by Yogendera Driving School, Sector 12, Noida as a responsible driver. I await the state's approval.
I love U-turns. I trace oblong O's as I circumvent the same U-turns. Baffles the traffic inspector because he sees the same car going in-and-out of the turn for about half an hour.

Somehow driving brings to your mind the quaint tunes of 'Fun, Fun, Fun' by the Beach Boys.

The lyrics are truly inspiring:

" Well she got her daddy's car

And she cruised through the hamburger stand now

Seems she forgot all about the library

Like she told her old man now

And with the radio blasting

Goes cruising just as fast as she can now

And she'll have fun fun fun till her daddy takes the t-bird away(fun fun fun till her daddy takes the t-bird away) "

..which is all i can think of for now.

Here's me abruptly signing off.

P.S.
The Lamborghini Murceilago is a pretty car. With the stunning kinetic streaks running past its composite body and THE KILLER SPEED it promises...hmm..I'm giving it a thought.