Never mind the fact that I had the same reaction when someone mentioned ‘Gajagamini‘ as well.

The female elephant theory (that I came up with in a state of total sobriety) seemed validated when Aamir Khan beefed up by drinking a truck full of milk and ate some twenty raw chicken each day in an effort to build up more muscles than Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and Hritik Roshan put together. By golly, did he succeed or what?

In any case, on saturday morning, I went on a long bicycle ride with a friend of mine and he and I rode about 80km that day. I hadn’t been on my bicycle for almost 21 days, thanks to having fallen ill and not having been in town, and I was surprised at myself for having done so much distance without any problems.

It was only when I got home and sat down for about thirty minutes and then tried moving did I figure out that I’d pulled some muscle in my leg, and was finally graduating to using crepe bandage for an aching muscle for the first ever time in my life. Sweet.

Somehow, the only way to remedy this painful situation was to counter it with something that was more painful, and this was when I decided to go watch Ghajini at the Inox in Swagath Garuda Mall in Jayanagar. God bless south Bangalore!

Ghajini met all expectations so far as painful fundas were concerned. True, the production values for the movie, the sync-sound and the background score were all at par, but the film was ‘Meh‘ at best for me.

It started off with a Prof. explaining to his ‘final year medical students’ as to how ‘The brain is the most vital organ of the human body‘. It was the first cue for me to get up and go, but having paid INR 180 and being the supercheap guy that I am, I decided that I had to endure the entire movie to get my money’s worth, or die trying.

Asin was super-cute in the movie, though I am of the school of thought that subscribes to how women should wear very little / no make-up, and had Asin done so, I am sure she’d have looked a lot prettier and would’ve had more people drooling in the aisles.

Aamir Khan showed more skin in the movie than Asin did, and there was one song in the movie which had six Aamir Khans dancing around in outfits that wouldn’t have been out of place in a gay-pride parade.

Should Aloo Aravind and Murgadoss want to promote the whole concept of male objectification as propagated by Aishwarya on her blog, and also take a few reels out of Dostana and pull gay audiences to the movie, then this ploy of having Aamir Khan wear SKimpy clothes is probably apt.

The other aspect about Ghaijini (apart from it being incredibly asinine at times) that I didn’t like was the violence in the movie.

Not that I am not a fan of violence. I’ve enjoyed every minute of movies like ‘Eastern Promises’ and ‘A History of Violence’ and Edward Norton’s scene in ‘American History X’ where he makes the car-jacker put his mouth on the pavement and kicks it in is one of my favourite cinematic moments.

But the violence in Ghajini, especially against the women, sends out all the wrong signals to our society which already has enough crazed elements without movies like these having to fuel their insanity further. One can see men fight each other all the way, but the golf-like stance with which Asin’s character was done away with was just a tad too gruesome to watch, especially with the extended, sadistic build up to it happening.

True, all those who I had arguments with about this particular scene said it was after all, just a movie. I agree. But giving it a U/A certificate and watching it with children isn’t such a good idea.

In retrospect, I’d rather have watched ‘The President is Coming‘, but then again, I had to do something about my hurting leg, apart from singing Bon Jovi’s ‘Gimme something for the pain’ from their 1995 album, ‘These Days’!

Gunda has had such tremendous fan following, and has had among the highest ratings [citation needed] that a Hindi movie could’ve ever had on IMDB for it incorporated all possible genres that one could think of into an intense three hour movie-thon.

Deshdrohi is the BIMARU film industry’s cinematic response of sorts to Raj T’s MNS’ anti-Bihari campaign. Now we all know that Raj Thackeray has been certified insane, and is doing this just like Paris Hilton did her multiple sexcapades and Presidential campaigns for footage from all quarters possible.

After enough visibility, Raj T plans to release an album and / or star in a few movies, but that was something his PR agent told me in strict confidence. Given the low readership of this website, I’m not really concerned about this news spreading around too much anyway.

“KRK is the new SRK“, screamed the headlines of the widely read Times of Patna. Considering the total subscribers of aforesaid esteemed newspaper are equal to the total number of google reader subscribers to this website, one can imagine how popular KRK has now become. Please note that I did not say ‘readers’, only ‘subscribers’. There is a difference.

With a star cast boasting of among others, Gracy Singh, who said this performance of hers makes her work in Lagaan look like that of Bobby Deol’s in Dostana, and Roza, who dated Saif Ali Khan for three days and landed six B and C grade movie offers in the process, as well as Hrishita Bhatt (who has added some three extra H’s and some seven T’s for numerological luck), who said in the Times of Patna that compared to KRK, SRK (with whom she’s worked in Asoka) was positively meh, this movie is also worth checking out for the eye-candy factor that it provides in addition to the strong social message which you can get when you watch the movie.

KRK has overthrown Ravi Kishan to now become the most sought after actor from the BIMARU states.

Ravi Kishan who needed a serial like Bigg Boss as well arbit ad-libbing of Kabir’s Dohas as the Bhojpuri voice of Peter Parker in Spiderman-3 to become famous all over the world has now gone on the offensive and last heard, was dubbing for all of Jean Claude Van Damme’s movies, to make JC’s famous quotes more accessible to everyone in the BIMARU region, while at the same time, increasing his market value.

In the Times of Patna, he was last quoted as saying that his drop in market value was due to the ” people going for recess” (emphasis mine) in Europe and America, and that once they all got back, he could start charging his regular rates. For the record, he was both a reader AND subscriber of the ToP.

KRK, reportedly charges a princely sum of INR 1000 per movie, and like Megamart’s offers, will do three for INR 2000, and perform his own stunts as well.

I would’ve quoted dialogues from the movie on my website, but I want all of you to go and watch the movie. I plan to convince my team at the office that this would be an ideal movie to watch during our upcoming team outing.

The first time I got my voter’s ID was when I turned 18 and was gung-ho about getting the indelible ink put on my left index finger after having exercised my right to vote.

Having had a change of address when my family moved to a new house circa November 2003 resulting in a consequent change in both the legislative assembly constituency as well as the parliamentary constituency, it was time to get another voter’s ID done.

However, I had to miss out on getting my ID issued when the rest of my family was having theirs done for the same reasons as I missed out on gatecrashing RJ Malavika’s wedding with Madman Aadisht (comments should indicate why such an action wouldn’t be undertaken even if I were in town).

When the electoral officials declared that there would be another round that would take place on 19th September 2008, I decided to get my card for it provided me with the ideal opportunity to play hooky from the office and not feel guilty about doing so.

When friday morning dawned, I was in for quite a surprise, because the government school where I was to get my ID done was not the one in the vicinity of my house, but one that was about two kilometres away in a village named maTTikyatanahaLLi.

Just as backgroud information, the place we live in is quite far removed from Mysore city, for unlike in Bangalore, if someone lives outside the Ring Road that surrounds the city, they are considered to be living on the outside of the outskirts.

Hence the place we live in is unblemished by the ways of the city life and is a peaceful and quiet sub-urb of sorts. Unmitigated bliss are there.

This explains why the whole hoopla of having to go to some random village transpired and now, I can actually get on with the narrative.

The walk to the village from our area was quite a pleasant one that afforded quite a few opportunities to take photographs, some of which I’m going to put up on my flickr account if I don’t feel too lazy later on.

When I got to the school after cutting through some fields and seeing a live mongoose cross the road without a care in the world, and also being witness to what I can only term as two buffaloes making out in a shallow pool of muddy water, I was quite surprised at how I enjoyed myself completely during the entire unplanned walk across semi dried up lakes and farmland, rendering me oblivious to the large distance I walked in order to get to my destination.

At the school, it was absolute mayhem as some lucky class was given the day off in order to accommodate this particular exercise. I saw kids peeping into the room where the photo IDs were being issued and giving all the assembled adults furtive glances, some of whom they were no doubt related to.

The queue was quite long, and the villagers were cutting in without any heed being paid to the protests by those behind them, who weren’t entirely overjoyed at the prospect of having to wait for longer than was necessary. So much so that some woman cut right in front of me, and stood her ground despite my repeated protests, which I realize in retrospect sounded more like polite implorings than anything else. Also, I Wasn’t keen on picking a fight with someone from the village because I was in unfamiliar territory and I guess I have to thank my lucky stars that I knew to speak the local language and have myself understood.

There were two main things that happened that morning that will remain in my mind for a long time to come. The first thing was not so funny, despite being superficially so.

The photo station was manned by some guy who had some basic expertise in operating a laptop with a webcam, and he was in charge of getting people’s photographs clicked. Most of the villagers that came to the school had no clue about their dates of birth and thus were not sure about their age. On being asked to provide their age / DOB, they were quite clueless. Some of them managed to give out a rounded off number while some others were assigned a number (usually a multiple of five or ten) by the guy behind the laptop.

A woman changed her age from 30 to 45 to 40 and finally settled on 37 because some guy was kind enough to calculate the mean of her maximum and minimum age. While this might seem quite funny, with the villagers having a hearty laugh when someone who was 50 saying he was 35 and all that, it showcased the basic issue of illiteracy among those in the villages to a large extent. While we monitor our ages, wait for our birthdays as occasions to celebrate and cherish, most of these people just struggle to make a living and are oblivious to regular things that you and I would take for granted and this particular incident was quite an eye-opener in this regard.

The second incident, which was quite funny was something I had anticipated. With three names that comprise of a family name, a given name and a surname (out of which I generally tend to drop the first one off), I knew that the probability of some fudge up taking place with the spelling tended towards one, and my fears were not unfounded, for the laptop guy, despite my having given him my old voter’s ID, mis-spelt two out of three words in my name, and made them all as part of one word.

(Turns out that the same mistakes were done for my folks’ voters IDs as well, but quite unusually, despite being highly vocal in their protests towards anything under the sun, as opposed to their easy going offspring who say ‘Meh’ for most things, they didn’t bother getting a correction made.)

After I recovered from the initial shock and shook myself off all the painful memories I’ve had since I could spell my name, when I found out much to my continued disappointment that others couldn’t, I launched into a vehement protest to get my ID done the way it was supposed to be. The official was not used to this, given the fact that he’d randomly assign ages and spell peoples’ names the way he wanted to, and after almost twenty minutes of arguements, I was finally given an opportunity to get a duplicate ID done.

Much to my disappointment, they took the misspelt ID from me and said I could keep it only if I could provide them with INR 25. Stupidly, I hadn’t carried any money with me and by the time I returned home, I was too lazy to go back to get it from them.

All in a day’s work. Whoever said getting a Voter’s ID card done is a cinch should be made to go through what I did on that fateful friday.

This officially earmarks the longest voluntary relationship I have ever had in my life. Either party could’ve broken up at will, but both of us have weathered many storms together and have stuck on, for some reasons best known only to the both of us, while most other reasons for aforesaid situation remain significantly inexplicable.

This NaN is going to focus on the memories I have had of September 1st over the past five years, and for sure, it has been quite interesting in more ways than I could have previously imagined.

For the first ever time in my life, I fell asleep in something akin to a class, because the person who was giving us the corporate presentation could as well have been spraying valium through an atomizer four inches away from my nostrils. In addition to my acute somnolence, I had also been, as I had mentioned previously, unwell, and the medicine that I’d been prescribed had given me a light tremor in my right hand, and for one of the first ever times in my life, I was scared as hell about whether I’d ever benormal again.

The doctor’s reassurance about it being a reaction to some expectorant tablet did nothing to remedy the situation, and it was only after I got better and I was able to write properly did I heave a huge sigh of relief.

I had been to the office a fortnight prior to my joining date, on 18th August to hunt for accommodation that was close to where I had to work. Seeing the amount of dirt, dust, traffic and the accompanying madness and mayhem was too much of a shock for me, given that Mysore was diametrically opposite insofar as the state of affairs on the roads were concerned.

Three days after the entire rigmarole began, I had called my Mum up and told her that I wanted to quit and open a grocery store in Mysore, or teach in my college and I’ve had constantly recurring thoughts of quitting work ever since, but the idea has been mulled over so much that its now relegated to that part of me that tends to over-romanticize trivial situations and circumstances.

Its been four years, and, as is quite evident, I still haven’t quit.

Music, which was such an important part of my life, had also been relegated to oblivion.

In the last week of August 2005, I contracted bronchopneumonia, and as a consequence spent the first anniversary of my starting life as a working professional in bed with a fever of 104 F, getting more pale and gaunt by the minute, but sleeping like a baby and feeling happy about not having to work during that time.

Not the best of times, but not the worst of times either.

On the morning of September 1st, I saw two mails – one of them said I had my august salary credited to my account, and another one congratulated me for two years of work in my company. I said Meh to both, as I had said to some other formerly important stuff at the very start of the trip and continued to work, without those two mails bothering me much until a few days ago when I took a lazy stroll down memory lane.

In retrospect, that second trip changed my life for the better in more ways than I’d have imagined it would.

Nevertheless, this was quite a tame and incredibly lazy time for me, and this anniversary passed on without much ado either.

Even if I end up going home after work and just crashing after watching some arbit stuff on TV, I know that I’ll have had fun simlpy because I’ve reached a stage where I don’t give a damn about too many things, and am in a controlled free-fall mode.

Plus I’d rather not get my “Meh” t-shirt or my “Security” t-shirt torn in any fracas that ensues from a retaliation to my righteous moral indignation.

I’ve ranted about virtually everything I can survey, including announcements at the airport loud enough to wake the dead, about cell phones and people who stand way too close to you when you are in a que.

This recent TOI article which put Madman on the front page has sought opinions from a bunch of people who’ve been strongly vocal about being all for child free zones in the country, and are willing to cough up some money to ensure some peace of mind. This particular set of posts makes for interesting reading, if this topic has caught your fancy.

I want to go watch Wall-E in the theatres shortly, but I am scared of going because of the noisy irritating kids, their noisier and more irritating parents, that will kill the movie for me. Sundays, in particular, are a bad time to hang out at a mall, which, by itself is a bad place to hang out in, in the first place.

Also, the presence of pesky badly behaved children on flights is is probably a reason why all international flights serve free alcohol, so that people that want to can drink up and crash. (Funny how using the word crash on a plane makes people cringe. It is one of the best ways of unfriending the person(s) sitting next to you.) In the absence of said free alcohol, twelve hour flights would be agonizingly painful, since the presence of kids guarantees a lack of absolute silence at all times, except during turbulence (which is quite fun to experience in retrospect).

An interesting incident that took place yesterday further fuelled me to write this post. I had been to Big Bazaar to buy chocolates to satiate my urge to gorge on sweets, which has lasted for more than a fortnight now, and alarmingly so. The chocolates counter was closed as a result of which, I picked up the next best thing, Hide and Seek Milano biscuits, and was standing in queue patiently, when some random kid who must’ve been four or five years old just walked past me, walked back towards me when she spotted the biscuit packet in my hand, and held into it and tugged it.

The shop was closing, and I had been sleeping all day and needed my sugar fix, and there was no way I was going to let a badly behaved kid snatch the pack from me. I did what I thought Wolverine would do in such a situation, I bared my teeth and growled at her in a menacing way, and since I hadn’t combed my hair after having woken up and was dressed in my favourite pair of horribly torn jeans, I could’ve passed off as a junkie who’s food shouldn’t be messed with.

The growl made the kid run for cover, and she hid behind her Mum and was taking a peek at me occasionally when she thought I wasn’t looking. The guy standing behind me in queue, who was standing too close initially saw the incident from up close, and then respectfully stepped back some distance when I went ahead to the check-out counter.

Growling and baring one’s teeth works. I’m sure if I had been even remotely badly behaved like said kid, my Dad would’ve given me a roundhouse kick. Thankfully, such instances were few and far between.

BTW, I vote in favour of child-free zones.

Its true that being in the IT industry for so long ensures that one embraces jargon or learns to abhor it from the very core of her / his existence, and falling in the latter category, I am no exception either. This subject is definitely material for another post, in due time.

Nevertheless, work-life balance is something some of my BSchool buddies have also used in order to convey the balance between academics and extra curricular activities.

Now, the very essence of the term and its subsequent usage denotes that it is an oxymoron, which thus implies that work and life are two different mutually exclusive entities. Hence, applying the regular tenets of logic would lead one to conclude that if you have a life, you can’t work and vice versa, which is why both of them need to be balanced out.

The implications are that work is not a part of your life, and this in turn makes even those who are ‘meh’ about their work to end up despising it merely because they now see it as something necessary but invasive.

I think the Indian IT industry is seeing a trend where the new poster boys are those that are able to juggle multiple things aside from work in their daily lives. It is a far cry from the times of old when the guy who’d spend ages in front of his comp working away was considered as a model employee.

Personally, I think the entire hoopla around the said term is stupid. If you can’t make time for something, it isn’t important enough.

Having unleashed the power of Meh, after having been introduced to this concept by quite a few people during my travels beyond a few oceans and quite a large number of seas and other assorted water bodies, I now present to you the AQ – Awesomeness Quotient, something that is guaranteed to change your life for the better, should you embrace this concept of mine with an open mind.

Sure, you’d have probably heard of the AQ before, but no Alexander Graham Bell shall upstage this Elisha Gray, and you shall be initiated into the wonderful ways of the AQ by the sentient one that propounded the concept, rather than someone who’d give you an ersatz, less awesome version of the facts.

The operative word for this entire post, as you might have guessed is ‘awesome‘, along with all its derivatives in adverb and adjective forms. If you thought it was quotient go to the * (starred) segment directly, and skip reading through the rest of this post.

A person’s AQ, as you can guess, is a relative term used to refer to how awesome a particular person is vis-à-vis someone else. Obviously, not everybody can be of the same levels of awesomeness. Then the world would be a boring place to live in. Imagine a world filled with CEOs. Not that CEOs are awesome by any stretch of anyone’s imagination except for their own, but this is just an example to illustrate my point of view. Awesome example, eh? I know!

Most of these tests that determine a person’s quotient would tend to put a person through a particular standardized test and then allocate them a number which would then be used to judge them in relation to others that have taken the test.

Awesomeness is not something that can be measured – its a vibe that can be felt within a short span of time and AQs are consequently awarded thereafter.

Let us all now be aware of the ground rules for AQs and their subsequent allocation to everyone on the planet.

1) The owner of this blog has an AQ of 300. That is the second-highest AQ for anyone in the universe. The only person to top his AQ is unaware of having done so, but said AQ topping was quite a landmark event nevertheless.

2) AQs can be allocated by me to people whose AQ is perceptibly lower than mine. Note that ‘perceptibly’ was just a place holder I put in to showcase how awesome my polysyllabic vocabulary is. You can get the entire meaning of that sentence by remaining oblivious to the use of that particular word.

3) So far as others are concerned, AQs can be awarded once they have received their AQs from me. It is to be noted that if I have allocated you an AQ, and you would in turn allocate someone else with an AQ, it has to be lower than yours. For instance, I give you an AQ of 280. You can then give someone else an AQ of 279 or less.

4) You CANNOT give anyone an AQ higher than yours. The only exception to this rule has been carried out once, before the entire rule system was put into place and awesomeness hadn’t yet been reined in, and was running amok in all the parallel universes in creation. However, if you do end up having a brain fart, you will lose your AQ and will be relegated to being a Roadie.

5) *(For those that thought the operative word for this post was ‘quotient’. Also for those that thought they could get toocleverbyhaf and give someone a higher AQ) Just like Lucifer fell from Grace and let Will take over instead to redefine television in a yucky way, your transgressions, if any will make you lose your AQ and you will end up being a Roadie.

Then you’d have to appear in TV shows, have the whole world make fun of you, fall off bikes, have two sex change operations in a row, use more curse words in two minutes than there were in all of ‘Scarface’ prior to its editing, and render yourself incapable of any logical activities, all in the name of the ‘Roadies Spirit’. Needless to say, you will be stripped of all your other attributes such as IQ and EQ.

(Ok, I admit to being jealous of Roadies. Seriously. Wouldn’t you be too? Hence the vitriol. They rock! Facetiousness has a new name.)

That takes care of the ground rules for AQs. There will be a small update on AQ usage in a day or two, once the author of this post can do an impact assessment to see how the world has changed upon his having unleashed said concept.

Until then, stay awesome…like me!!!

Call it a strong inclination to not write in a hitherto observed manner, call it an overdose of Asterix comics featuring Julius Ceasar where the subject in question also refers to himself in the third person, name and all, call it the blog owner’s need to satiate the reader’s need for reading the same garbage over and over again, albeit packaged differently each time or call it Ishmael, your call.

The blog owner, who will henceforth be referred to in the third person singular pronoun (he / him – in lowercase ONLY) turns 25 tomorrow. Yeah, its time for you, dear reader, to acknowledge that and wish him, should you choose to. The thing is, he’s not really too keen on your wishes, and this post is being written for posterity simply because its nice to reflect on one’s thoughts a few years down the line.

He thinks his archived posts are really fun to read, narcissistic or egotistic though it might sound. He wants this post also to fall under the aforementioned category.

Now, he’s not particularly excited about turning 25. On being asked to make a statement to the general public regarding this supposedly monumentous occasion, he had this to say – umm…ahh…ah ha! Meh.

Maybe he also said it because its an intensely private emotion that he’d like to keep to himself and celebrate and enjoy it with those close around him rather than get screen printed t-shirts about it each time he finishes another complete revolution around the sun or go engage in something other than acts of random kindness, it is something for you to figure out, but he’s sure its futile to write beyond this paragraph because he thinks he’s lost your attention already.

Turning 25 is not a big deal. Turning 18 is. Then one can sing that Bryan Adams song ’18 till I die’ and mean it. Its eligible to be sung only by those above 18. If you’re a 15 year old singing ’18 till I die’ like you mean it, you have acromegaly, and it is imperative that you get a medical check up. Go on, the rest of the blog is for adults only, anyway. 18 also gives you the right to vote, the right to drive a geared motor vehicle of any sort, and to watch adult movies, though it has been proven statistically that more sub-18s watch stuff meant for the above 18 year olds.

Turning 21 is a big deal. Now you can sing ’1921′ by The Who, because even though the song title is misleading, the song is all about how Pete Townshend feels that ’21 is a good year, and by the principles of self-interpretation of any situation to suit your convenience, one could also assume that this is a song for a 21 year old. In addition, if you are a guy, you can get married and if you are a girl, you could be having your third child post matrimony (in theory), should your need to have great-great-great grandkids and SEE them while you’re still alive is so very strong. Also, one can elope in a manner similar to a Hindi movie starring Aamir Khan and Juhi Chawla, and then commit harakiri simply because the script demanded so.

Turning 25, however, awards you no such privileges. No dramatic deaths, no extra incentives, no confetti parades (thankfully) and no pay hikes. It earmarks what the Times of India or the Bangalore Mirror calls a quarter-life crisis, especially for those like him, who’ve been trying to find themselves for so long, with varying degrees of success.

When asked about how he is going to deal with the possible onset of a quarter life crisis, he had this to say – ‘Meh‘.

He is alarmed about the possible onset of relatives who would now be hounding him as a last resort to get some poor unsuspecting girl married off to him, after every other guy who is more eligible than him has rejected the said person on various grounds.

It is widely claimed and acknowledged among those of his community that despite his apparent reputation of being a ‘software engineer’, that he associates himself with ‘musician types’ and other such riff-raff and is ‘anti-social’ and is consequently probably going to turn up as a match only if one were to try and scrape the bottom of the barrel one last time, and the upturn it, give it a vigorous shake, to see what might’ve been stuck there.

The other alarming prospect that fills each of his two hundred and six bones with dread is dealing with birthday wishes which are invariably followed by the statement – ‘Where is the treat?’. He understands perfectly the sentiment behind the wish, and can acknowledge it gratefully with extreme courtesy, politeness, a brilliant 28-teeth Pepsodent smile, but the request that follows it is baffling.

He is of the opinion that this is similar to a guy speaking to a girl and exchanging perfunctory greetings with her on a few occasions, and then randomly saying – ‘You’re beautiful, will you marry me?’. Its almost as if the guy expects the girl to marry him simply because he said she was beautiful.

If you want a treat, it should be accompanied by a present. Or else you should not ask for one. That is a sure-fire way of making him treat you, because he’s a big fan of this whole reverse-psychology thing. Plus he’s already got a treat white list, and these special people will be treated no matter what. Its his way of being able to spend time with them when he can if he can.

The whole 25 thing is not bothering him one bit. He’s sure that the next 25 years will be as eventful if not more, if he has any say in how circumstances will transpire.

To quote Longfellow from ‘A Psalm of Life’: