Bring on the hits!
The site meter also goes on to explain the various details of all the people that have chanced upon this blog, the location they’re in, the time they’ve stuck onto this page, and so on and so forth.
I know you’re yawning, but read on, this post gets interesting…….
Firstly, a small request, bring on the hits! More power to blogger, and more readers on whom I unleash my blog. Thats it with the shameless self-advertisement for this post.
Secondly, another small request…do subscribe to the RSS feeds, but please, please do visit the site too, so that “the site counter hits the roof”, to use an extremely popular expression that I came up with three posts ago.
I have, for the first time since installing the site-meter, actually clicked on the link and I have seen a lot of vague places that I have got hits from. For all my international readers out there, I will now move on to leaving personalized messages, so that you keep coming back for more.
To my single reader from Taipei, Taiwan:
Me speake Englishe too. Me speake lotsa languageses. Me want to bomb mainland China if they repeate the 1962 War scenario. Me fully on your side. Me shalla tone down me grammal for your leading preasure!
To the two Aussies and the New Zealander who must’ve accidentally stumbled on this site:
Dudes, I know you’re CIA operatives who’ve just flown from Langley over to Auckland and Brisbane just to prove that you’re some random surfers, while actually trying to see if my blog is a recruiting ground for the News Channel that flicked the name off my blog. For the last time, I am a inconsequential software engineer who’s probably going to stand at attention everytime one of your relatives who is probably working in a major IT company in the bay area snaps his fingers. Don’t bother. Stop wasting tax dollars. Use it instead to buy more duct tape for George W when its really going to matter.
To all the European people that visited this site:
I am not an anti-Semite, and shame on you if you are ! You cannot find links to Ashtanga Yoga classes that Pattabhi Jois conducts in Mysore, though I hail from that place. It doesn’t matter if you’re so hot that you’re contributing to global warming, I will still not be able to help you. Send me a pic though, and I might…just might reconsider. Contact me at bogus_email_address@sitedoesnotexist.com.
To all my readers from the US:
I know you all are Desis. The present generation of Yanks can’t read for nuts. The present generation of American kids want to outsource their attendance requirements to the poor village student in Byratanahalli. (Imagine, the spelling bee finals without Desis would have had them spelling the “mass” in mass destruction, for the top prize!)
The CIA operatives fly to Australia and New Zealand so that they can hoodwink me into thinking they’re not really interested.
Keep the flag flying high! Jai Hind! Pump in more dollars into our economy through FDIs and FIIs, and raise the level of our GNP. Yeah, baby!!
Also, lets gun for a second generation immigrant grandson of a Desi to be the 63rd President. Thats much better than whats happening currently, with George W Bush cost cutting on his speech writer’s pay packet by hiring Laloo’s speech writer, with only a poor translator converting the speech from Bhojpuri to English. Outsourcing is here to stay, lets take it to their shores!
Also, since your poorer cousins back in India cannot afford iPods at the prices that they’re being sold here, please do get one each time you return to the motherland. Vinayak Kamath, my iPod getter, my many thanks to you once again.
To those in the middle East:
Go here. For the very last time, I will not accept Osama’s tapes. I don’t give a shit about terrorism. PLEASE treat your women better. (I see more women flocking my site now…click that firefox “go” button to reach my URL. Go baby!).
Please get this clear – Camel is the ship if the desert. Clemanceau is the deserted ship.
To those in Africa:
What the hell!! I thought you didn’t have electricity there!!! (There are actually no hits from Africa!)
To everyone in India:
Well, high speed internet access at your company surely rocks. So does your taste in blogs. I commend thee for that. Kutz, thanks for the link on your blog. You’ve quadrupled the number of my readers. Now there are 8 people in our country who actually access my blog.
To my Dog:
grr-woof-woof…grr grr-rowf (I will get your favourite dog biscuits next time I come home to Mysore, sorry for the delay).
Thanks, and hope you’ve had a good read.
The Lord of the Fly
Any resemblances between this post and that book, save for the tweaked title, surely means that some *@&*&$ has managed to lay hands on my blogger ID and password.
This evening, when I went to the john to take a leak, I chanced upon the inspiration that has enabled me to pen down this post.
There was this guy who was trying to talk on his phone, that unfortunately for him, probably rang when he was in an uncompromising position.
When I entered, I saw him trying to tuck his shirt in with one hand through his fly, while attempting to hold a conversation with somebody, presumably important.
He looked like a contortionist straight out of the Guiness book of World Records, trying to satiate himself in some vague auto-erotic fashion, and since his back was turned to me during his entire exercise, I had the good fortune of not having to stifle a Cheshire Cat-like grin.
He is now officially deemed as “The Lord of the Fly”.
The men’s room at the office is a very funny place to be at. Kinda brings every dude out there, be it CEO, or entry-level programmer, on the same level playing field. If you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.
The true meaning of ‘metro-sexual’ a.k.a ‘pansy’ is something that is brought out in vivid detail here in the men’s room.
The very same macho techie with ripping biceps and a tight t-shirt bearing the caption “Look – I’ve not bought a new shirt since class 3!” can be seen staring intently in the mirror at close range, trying to count the number of pimple scars that his facial make-up cream has failed to hide. Sometimes without being observed, the subject might even use Vernier’s callipers to measure the thickness of his sideburns, and call up his hairdresser Sylvie (or whatever else he calls his cross-dresser ‘personal stylist’) to demand a refund for a shoddy job done.
All my life, I have been under the false impression that women are the ones who spend a lot of time in front of the mirror. After being in the corporate environs for a little over a year, this misconception of mine has now gone out of the window.
In my defence to the above statement, though, I have never paid too much attention to my looks. Its not because I look like Adam Garcia, but mainly because my family did a good job of shielding me from finding out how I look for most of my life. What happened when I finally did figure it out is material for another post.
The essence of the matter is that they ensured that there never were too many mirrors around me. I was made to believe that the chubby, healthy kid on the cerelac cartons was actually me, and since there were so many snaps of me circulating all over the country, they didn’t exactly feel the need to take some more of them.
Hence, I subsisted, and still continue to do so, on the barest minimum of items necessary for personal grooming, if such a term is applicable to me in the first place.
A comb (rarely used), deoderant (used in the absence of having had a bath, essentially – all the time), hair oil (unopened, but lying there nevertheless to prove to Mum that her instructions are being followed), shaving equipment (used only when passport pictures of mine have to be clicked), and of course, the nail clipper, just so that my tooth enamel doesn’t look worse than it already does, and also because I can’t chew the nails off my big-toe, a la the contortionist Fly lord.
You can imagine the surprise on my face, when I find out that my grooming equipment looks like a scaled down travel kit for most of my other contemporaries. Without wishing to divulge the various places or the various people concerned, I can vouch for the fact that I have seen atrocious things like ‘Fair and Lovely’ (before ‘Fair and Handsome’ came into the market), a whole host of deos and perfumes (one or two at the max, I can understand!) and even some hair-removal cream at some of my friends’ houses.
Truly hair-raising to see all this in a guy’s closet, specially when his dwellings are laden with clothes unwashed for days, with mould and fungi growing on them, and the whole place smells of socks.
This has led me to come to the conclusion that I have been relegated to being an old-timer, so far as keeping pace with the latest trends in fashion is concerned. I’m so glad I am not ever going to be considered a ‘metrosexual’.
Now that men in general have found strong parallels between metrosexuality, and being labelled a pussy, the hoi-polloi junta has now come up with some other vague thing called ‘ubersexual’, which is again a redundant synonym, just because the common person speaking english is not really all that well versed in German. Eventually, the page 3 motley crew will resort to more and more obscure terms, borrowed from lesser-known languages such as Yiddish and Swahili to have their say, and to vainly try and convince the ordinary male out there that he is ‘mbwanesexual’ or ‘mazeltovsexual’.
Long live the page 3 crowd, for they make our insignificant lives seem less ordinary in comparison!
by the beard of the Prophet!!
He mentioned that if Calvin were a political critic, this is how his blog would look like. *More shameless self advertisement, that!*
If blogging be the in-thing for shameless-self-promotion-without-a-cause, read on.
The convtoversial depiction of the Prophet’s cartoons have ruffled many an unkempt beard. The kind of saliva and froth that all the hard-liners and clerics have generated, berating the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and all the other news papers that have committed this sacrelige, is enough to fill the Dead Sea twice over.
In case you haven’t checked out the cartoons, I suggest you google at your own risk to find out. If I didn’t know it was the Prophet who was being represented there, I probably would have thought it was some random vague cartoon, of someone depicting the Arab stereotype, probably some super-rich Sheikh who had enough money made from camel butter to fund terrorism and maintain an entire harem at each oasis where he’d pitch tent, at the same time!
Jehadis martyr themselves in the hope that they get to make sweet love to virgins in heaven, after having sacrificed their lives for blowing themselves up, and a lot of fun was made of this aspect of their school of thought in the cartoons!
Judging by the way they’re conking themselves out, I think its quite a distinct possibility that the Supreme One might have approved the proposals by the development authorities there to construct a separate Martyr’s heaven, (which will be an absolute replica of the current one, with one exception – auto hymen-repair wands sold at wholesale prices) so that their bawdy fetishes can be satiated far away from all those people that dilligently follow all the rules to get there.
In short, customer satisfaction is probably rated very highly in the after-life too, considering how viable its becoming for people to want to get there.
Karl Marx once said “Religion is the opiate of the masses”. Guess he didn’t assume his off-hand statement would mean so much and more in the present day scenario. There are religious fanatics everywhere, for every single religion that exists on the planet, with Buddhism and Jainism probably being the most notable exceptions.
Hail to the Bodhisatva, and to all the Jain Tirthankaras.
Coming back to where I think I started off from, most people have this favourite expression which goes “By the beard of the Prophet”, something I came across first in a Tintin comic. I am filled with wonder about how something as sacred as the beard of the Prophet can be spoken about so openly by each and every person who knows the expression, and use it for the most trivial of things.
“Mom, I swear by the beard of the Prophet that I have not enrolled in the Islamic Jihad as their official human landmine detector. I just lost my legs playing football when someone tackled me hard!”
Hazrat Bal, in our very own Kashmir, supposedly houses a single hair on the head of the Prophet (though he is always turbaned, and might be bald for all its worth it!), and such a storm was created in preserving the shrine and its sanctity, thereby ensuring that the terrorists who were holed up inside could relax there for a lifetime, if only their supplies lasted that long.
The Indian commandos supposedly were more careful here, as compared to the way in which they executed Operation Bluestar to bonk off Bhindranwale, or how they managed to rescue people at the Swaminarayan temple in Gujarat, and yet, you have everybody having the chutzpah to talk openly about the Prophet’s beard. Isn’t that blasphemy?
Trey Parker and Matt Stone (creators of South Park, for those who came in REALLY late)probably don’t have fatwas issued against them because nobody in the middle-east is cool enough to simultaneously be a hard-liner cleric and appreciate South Park at the same time. Or maybe, its just possible that since these two gentlemen are berating all religions all and sundry, nobody is criticizing them.
In the 30s, when the Jews were depicted as being hook nosed, wearing frock coats, with ringlets around their side burns, and extracting money from the poor Christians, nobody seemed to bother. In fact, the typical stereotype of a Jew till date remains as that of someone who is extremely cunning, and someone who is, in all probability a stingy money lender, who goes all out on the day of the Sabbath, just because its the only day of the week that his missus is obligated (yes, according to the Torah) to give him any.
If the Muslims want to take revenge on the Christians, the best thing that they could possibly do is to use their eye-for-an-eye, chop-hand-for-theft rule, and draw cartoons of Jesus, and Jehovah, and all the apostles, and St.Peter and God himself only knows who else.
The only problem that I see with this approach is that a whole lot of people would probably say “been there, done that.” Nobody can make as much fun of the immaculate conception as Trey Parker and Matt Stone did (them again!), and you should probably check out this link, again at your own risk.
http://www.lyricsdownload.com/south-park-the-most-offensive-song-ever-lyrics.html
Humour is an essential part of life, and without it, our lives would be mundane and repetitive, boring to the max. A lot of catastrophic things would happen, if humans didn’t value humour. Douglas Adams would not be revered like he is now. FRIENDS would be a porn serial (which is not so bad, if Matt Le Blank (sic), David Schwimmer and the third guy whatzizname were thrown out of the picture to make it a lesbian orgy), Sex and the City would live upto its name literally (also not a bad thing), and most vitally this blog would have ceased to exist.
For all those that dispute the last statement, I have nothing to say. I refuse to waste my time trying to come up with an insult for such….well…see, I refuse to waste time!
Finally, nobody makes fun of the blacks the way they themselves do, and no brother reading this blog is ever gonna get offended by this (borrowed from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket):
How do you stop five brothers from raping a woman?
Throw them a basketball.
Until next time….
freedom butchers : battle of the half-wits
Freedom butcher.
Yes.
You read it right.
In a world that runs mainly on oil, and hot air orally generated by all the gas bags on the planet ( George W is not bothered about the rising oil prices because he talks to his Air Force One fuel tank each morning before setting for any trip, and the hot air he generates is enough to sustain 2 round trips around the globe, non-stop?),Osama finally decided to take some initiative on his own.
Honestly, would you like to lose to George W Bush in any sort of a contest?
Nevermind the fact that he is a 33rd degree Freemason, just like all the other US Presidents were before him. Nevermind also the fact that he leads the country that is allegdly the most powerful one on earth.
A normal average person losing out on anything, specially a battle of words or a war on terror, to someone like GBW would be much more insulting than it would be for Einstein, should Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, along with N’sync, Reeky Marteen and my other favourite artists ended up formulating the Grand Unified Theory of physics.
To delve into the psyche of a suicide bomber, an umpteen amount of research has gone into profiling and studying their backgrounds. A whole lot of studies have been undertaken to eventually arrive at the grand conclusion that a suicide bomber could be either male or female, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or Neutral, could be educated or not, could either be well off or living in dire straits, could possibly be either on the side opposing the party that was harmed, or on the agressor’s side and so on and so forth.
Yawn.
How typical.
Do you really think this is a failure on the part of all those brilliant people out there who conducted such heavy duty research to identify and zero in on a person, who could be the next Mohd. Atta? Or would you like to delve into the realm of the obvious and come to the same grand conclusion that I now have?
To all those of us who are not part of the ‘great US of A’ or in some cases adoringly referred to as ‘the great Satan’ by some of its adversaries, GWB personifies America.
From a general standpoint, America is Bush, Bush is America.
I know this is not at all true, because they’ve given us Edison, Martin Luther King Jr, Elvis not to mention Will Smith and the thriving lesbian porn industry, for which I fervently count my blessings.
Isn’t it then surprising that people would be so vehemently against the US? Think about it. Did 9/11 take place when Clinton was around?
Even Pearl Harbor is now suspected to be a Japanese faux pas. The planes set off along the wrong side of the globe, and those japasses mistook Korea for Hawaii, and the rest is the second half of World War II, or, if you want me to throw cliche, history. Who would have known that faulty compasses generated by some disgruntled worker in the Mitsubishi factory for manufacturing Zeros changed the world so much, eh?
But the past is past, and there is only the future to sit and mope about.
Anti-US sentiments would most naturally come around in everyone, for the prime reason that the country, to me, resembles a gigantic troll with a club, bashing things, people, places and everything else in its vicinity randomly.
GBW’s presence, under these circumstances is as helpful as kerosene oil is for putting out a raging forest fire.
For someone like Osama, who has always had his way with the chicks, been a good stud in college, has billions and billions of dollars, and is generally very good leader material would naturally be offended by the fact that he has to share the world leadership platform with a doofus.
But ladies and gentlemen, now the dude has smartened up. He has learnt invaluable lessons from his adversaries. He has now decided that the only way to make himself visible on the world stage, next to hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings, is to use a whole bunch of gassy words, a ploy of his that would have worked wonders in favour of the world in general and John Kerry in particular, had Osams decided to embark on this course of action orignially instead of attempting to sabotage the Indian IT and outsourcing industry by hijacking planes on a different continent altogether!
Where else do you think terms like freedom butcher would otherwise stem from??
Think about it. Or better still, step away from the monitor, slowly and then run away as fast as you can in the opposite direction.
Better still, head for another planet.
Things that make you go…..whoa!!!
On an average, Mangalorean girls are the prettiest on the planet, with their freshly clean scrubbed look, sans the gaudy outfits and the three-inch thick layers of make up. They are the kinds that you’d wanna take home to your mother too, though most of them would consent only if you managed to imperius them.
The women in Bangalore on the other hand, are the kind who are supposedly the most sophisticated ones in the country, miles ahead of everyone else. The plethora of women in the top managements of most companies seems to just reinforce this fact.
Suave, sophisticated, mentally strong, they defy Mick Jagger when he sang “you can’t always get what you want” many many times over.
It is also note to mention that they are very very good at taking care of themselves on a superficial level too, and after a thorough study of the female form which has taken up a whole lot of man hours on my part and those of the others who also boast of the inner eye for such things, we have arrived at the inescapable conclusion that even the ‘slept-in’ look that some women have, complete with messed up hair, and wrinkled clothes and an extremely casual style of walking involves a lot of preparation on the part of the subject in question. This is only reinforced by the fact that they look so so so very hot and attractive even in that look!
For all I know, thats probably the hottest look right now, hair gone awry, with a loose fitting sweater, a pair of jeans and some vague chappals, and all this just goes to give you yet another reason apart from the fact that I am fanatically non-homo a s to why I cannot give Prasad Bidapa or Rocky S or the other designers (a.k.a non straight people) out there a run for their money!
One of the most interesting things that I have seen is how low-cut most women’s jeans have become, while contrastingly, their t-shirts have become shorter, ensuring that they give us more leeway to admire the work of art that is the female form. Sometimes, you get to see what colour their panties are, and the more smooth operators have actually met their future wives by starting off a conversation revolving around that very issue. Picture this conversation at a bar in Bangalore:
(the color of the garment has been masked to protect the identity of the people involved!)
Stud(S): hey lady, I couldn’t help but notice that you’re wearing ***** colour g-strings!
Belle(B): (chewing gum lazily) yeah? so what’s your point?
S: I got the same thing on myself!!!!
B: you do? come on, lets go back to my apartment and make sweet love then!!!
S: (thinking to himself) “Praying to the ITPL Gods actually works!!!”
And Stud and Belle hook up, discover other common interests, have a lot of deep and meaningful monosyllabic conversations, get married, have a couple of kids, get a house in the sub-urbs and live happily ever after.
I am getting to be too too good at this romance thing, whatsay???
Anyway, I was travelling on a BTS bus towards Residency Road along with a couple of friends of mine, and I looked at something that made me miss dinner that day. We saw a guy with a medium sized potbelly, and a short t-shirt and low waist jeans.
An offensive stretch of brown skin, with stretch marks here and there, and that too on a dude, was just a bit too much to bear.
In retrospect, had I known what a deep psychological scar I would have had to deal with after just glancing at you-know-what, I would probably have not ventured outside of home that day!
There were a whole host of jokes about the anomaly sitting on the bus, one of which I have reproduced here, to try and divert your mind away from that morbid vision:
“Maybe he’s just trying to fit in!”
I honestly can’t remember the other ones. My mind is trying to use the smoke screen of selective amnesia so that I will not be traumatised and scarred for life.
I think I can use this excuse at the office to try and get away from work for yet another day!
I think I should try and end this post with something to justify the fact that there is a lot of good out there in the world, despite ugly fat men wearing low t-shirts and low cut jeans and venturing outside their mental detention center to psyche us out, and you can find solace and be at peace with yourself by watching a Mallika Sherawat movie. I wouldn’t recommend any of the lesbian porn that I watched because I want to maintain a good-boy image.
Au revoir!
The day the music came back to life
Most of us might not really know who he is, but trust me, we have a lot to thank him for.
Next in line is a gentleman named Jonathan Ive. He is a God too, made one because of Tony Fadell.
I guess at this point in time, if you’ve been irritated enough for my not having elaborated their virtues, you’re probably googling these names to find out for yourself.
Tony Fadell was the guy who originally came up with the concept of the iPod and was hired by Apple later on, and Jonathan Ive was the person responsible for its subsequent designs.
This is not a blog posting extolling their virtues or their contributions to society and to music lovers (and of late, music video and photo lovers too). I have not reached the level yet, where my blog is going to revolve around anyone but me. Tis true, empty vassals make more noise, sort of like empty vessels themselves.
Anyway, for more on these guys and the iPod, go here.
In the last posting I spoke about how the music died, ever since I started work. I thankfully have the good fortune of being able to have 24/7 access to the internet, which I shamelessly exploit by downloading mp3s, among other things.
My comp at work has a sound card, and I am given the liberty of being able to use headphones while at work, whenever it is not required that I listen to someone. This is rarely the case, with a million interruptions about this bug, or that doc update or a whole host of other things that inadvertently ensure that your listening experience is as smooth as travelling on an unserviced pre World War I era bicycle with flattened tyres on the roughest stretches of Bannerghatta road.
In addition, my material assets, allegdly portable, did not warrant being carried around because my built is not conducive to me wearing pants whose pockets are big enough to accommodate a five inch diameter discman, without it appearing as if I have a bulge in my pants. The bulge in the pants would not be such a bad thing if only God made me look more like Adam Garcia, so that it would invite pick-up lines from nubile pretty young things, and not so young nubile pretty things, and not so nubile pretty young things and so on (3 parameters, how many combinations….go figure!). But for the one single time I took it, all that the flattened lunchbox lookalike of a discman that could only play audio CDs and not mp3s invited, was looks from jackasses with mp3 players and compact ear plugs with long battery backups, who made me feel as if I was Leopold, (from Kate and Leopold) minus the charm, the good looks, the charisma, the money and the sex appeal. In short, apart from the fact that my headphones looked like I had robbed a 3 year old of her hairband, and the flattened lunchbox thing which was half out of my pockets when I sat in the office bus, I thought the music had come back to my life.
Note: travel advisory- please travel in office buses without speakers, which keep blaring songs from radiocity 91FM in the morning, for they will induce a feeling that makes motion sickness seem orgasmic!
I don’t get paid much. Come to think of it, I think the salary that I draw is about 0.0002 percent of what my CEO’s fixed deposit for his pet dog gets as interest, and that divided by 12 is what I get monthly, and minus tax cuts and so many other deductions that leave me as confounded as I did when I tried to understand women from as early as class 2, I am left with this paltry sum of money with which I can barely make ends meet (whatever the definition of that is).
The prospect of listening to music on my antiquated discman was so inviting that I totally overlooked the fact that I couldn’t carry the bulky 9V adapter with me in the bus. Hence I had to rely on batteries, and alkaline batteries are about 40 bucks a pair. I didn’t for the life of me imagine that I would have to make daily investments of that amount, to be able to listen to 13 songs on a CD burnt when I was a little less musically enlightened than I currently am. In short, it was not exactly a pleasant experience. I decided to switch to standard batteries for some time, but they ran dry so fast, (half a song listened to at volume to drown out radiocity playing on the bus) that I felt that the company that made discmen had some sort of connection with these battery manufacturers to make the lives of the ordinary consumer miserable by draining them out faster than a swimming pool would be drained if Obelix jumped in it. So much for asinine consipracy theories.
After the debacle that was CAT 2005, I figured that I had to do something to get a fresh start to the new year 2006, and made up my mind to get the music back into my life, and do a proper job of it this time.
To cut a really long story to pieces and examine the most relevant part with an electron microscope and present it to you, I zeroed in on an iPod.
A work of art, a wonderful companion, black, stored 30GB of whatever you wanted it to, played videos and stored photos, and was sleek and thin.
A good friend of mine named Vinayak Kamath came down from the US for his engagement, and at the same time, managed to buy me an iPod that meets the above specs.
It was love at first sight, and it felt like a new relationship altogether, me and my iPod.
Life has now become an endless movie soundtrack, and right from the time I take the long walk to the bus stop till the time I get back home, everything feels so good.
The other day, I had to catch a bus, and had to chase it for quite a distance. PF’s “in the flesh” was playing in the background, and I could actually visualise myself running towards the bus in slow motion, with other hapless motorists swerving to avoid running me over, to make it to the bus stop and lunging towards the door just in time before the driver could get the bus into second gear. The whole mundane exercise of chasing the bus seemed so romantic that now, I really look forward to even being chased by a ferocious canine at the dead of night, with some appropriate song playing on the pod.
I need to add something to my definition of an ideal life, something I guess I had taken for granted for quite some time.
Good food, good sleep, good shit and good music.
This blog posting is dedicated to an amazingly talented guitarist, someone named Prashant Linus Patrick (fondly called Prashant Anus Fat-dick), who was the lead guitarist of the band I used to play for onceuponatime ago, who lost half a finger on his left hand in an unfortunate accident. Hope he gets to play again.
The day the music died….
This resulted in me cramming up the entire hard-disk with mp3s, as well as lots of movies which I put in the ‘never to be deleted movies’ directory, which I inadvertently deleted for adding more movies to ‘absolutely-never-to-be-deleted-movies-folder’. That got deleted too, for want of space.
This entire exercise taught me many things, among which, the main one was that I should probably have put attack on Dad to get me an 80GB hard drive, so that I could accumulate more trash, to delay the inevitable. It also taught me that the digital media penetration was substantial enough for someone else in my immediate circle of friends or in its vicinity to have copies of what I wanted.
The same cousin who gave me the discman, probably for my not being annoying as the rest of his first cousins were (or so I would like to think, to shirk away from facing the bitter truth), also gave me a ‘thank-you-for-not-attending-my-wedding-and-being-a-pain-in-my-ass’ present, which I guess was also his way of thanking me for absenting myself from the sessions where most of his relatives (quite a whole of the Shenoy/ Kamath /Prabhu /Rao /*.* Konkani surname junta) would gather around, and pull his leg royally about the possible exploits that he would indulge on the day that he was rumoured to consummate his marriage.
He gave me an amazing wireless headphone set, which I can never thank him enough for. He redeemed himself in mine eyes for having given me that non-mp3 compatible discman.
You see, our abode was not exactly what one would like to call big, or even medium-sized, for that matter, and that resulted in our TV and my faithful comp being kept in close proximity, and being the average middle class family that we are, TV crazy, there was quite a cacophony pretty much all the time in our living room cum dining room cum hall cum drawing room cum guest bedroom, with incessant scrambles for the remote control, which used to be carried all over the place by whomsoever was watching the TV, so as not to relinquish control of it. I have been particularly notorious in that aspect, having taken it to the loo once for an extended session when I wanted to watch a football match, which was clashing with some pansy serial that my sister wanted to watch. Considering how United got drubbed by Porto at Old Trafford that evening in the Champions league QF, I think I would have been better off watching that pansy serial myself.
Getting back to the music in my life, it was virtually impossible to listen to music or watch movies on the comp while the infernal idiot box was jabbering away, and these wireless headphones which completely enveloped my ears and drowned out all traces of external noise at the flick of a switch came as a welcome addition to my limited material assets, which numbered 4 then(at an incredible average of one for every 5.5 years of my life!).
This resulted in me being able to play music on the comp, plug in the transmitter of the headphones, and retire to the confines of my bedroom, to read or just space out.
Campus recruited at one of the supposedly happening companies in the Indian IT industry kept me in a sense of suspended animation so far as my limited aspirations of grossly indulging in Bacchanalian orgies were concerned. This was at a period of time in my life when I had not even correlated the meaning of outsourcing in the context of what was supposedly the bustling IT industry.
I started work on september 1st 2004, at this ‘happening’ IT place, and it was within a short span of time that I realised that work was not what it was projected as being, in the campus presentations that we had, and in everything that was said to all of us that were outside of this vicious circle. It was all about the money, and not about the dum dum da da dum dum, and those that wanted it would not let anything stand in their way.
Kicking myself for my naievete was not really an option, for I had no plan B, and it was either sink or swim, and I plunged into the big bad world of the employed in the IT industry, gasping for breath, but determined to have my place in the sun nevertheless, in one capacity or another.
That was the day that cynicism and a loss of innocence came about in my being, and I think a lot of like-minded brethren in this industry would concur with me, in saying that that was probably the day that the music died.
Stonkey Monthly Update – June 2008
Turns out, after the day their species was created on 12th May 2008, very little thought has been paid to them in lieu of life, the universe, everything and everything else apart from it having gotten in the way, in some cases, very pleasantly so.
However, Rahul and Priya are not languishing away in some dark corner of someone’s backpacks, being constantly pummelled by umbrellas, folded Swiss Army knives, books of assorted shapes, sizes and vintage or 500 ml plastic water bottles or bootlegged absinthe.
Well, atleast Priya isn’t cause she is in Shrenik‘s house. The same can’t be said about Rahul though.
There has been feedback given with regard to how all the Rahuls and Priyas we know have been offended for the Stonkeys having been given their names. What they don’t realize is that in a few years from now, they’d be on par with Svayambhuva Manu and Satarupa, Adam and Eve, Pappa Smurf and Mamma Smurf and so on.
Shrenik plans to come up with a photo essay on what transpires among the Stonkeys, while efforts are also underway to make them meet more often. Rahul Stonkey, meanwhile should be made to understand that there is no way he can be gay, for by doing so he’s already eliminated all options he has of ever being able to procreate.
Next month – a possible photo essay and more stories.
Last heard, someone from Auroville saw this LJ and has decided to make more Stonkeys. But ours are the real McCoy, make no mistake.
