Nature's Call

It was all going perfectly according to plan. The world was at peace, the beings in harmony, one part eating the other, and the other sacrificing itself to sustain the first. Green and brown above, blue and grey below. It worked, it sustained what could have gone on for eons.

Why, then, did nature create man? Suddenly, in what was practically a flash in the billions of years of the DNA code, there was this, thing, that was fast, strong, and hungry beyond fulfillment. Hacking, and burning, and digging and scraping apart all that was there until its subjugation of all around it was complete. Until the very mother that caused him to be wept tears of acid and blew away its tattered covers to sear him with the sun’s rays.

What was this grand scheme that caused nature to make something that would think up a power greater than itself to dominate and torture that which gave birth to him so completely? And when there was no other to be ravished, turn on each other in a noisy bickering that would outlast generations of his own kind?

Come to think of it, why make the parasite, too? When everyone sustains on ability, everyone survives on another, whence comes the conniving to take it all, irritate, kill, pillage, burn, destroy, and not give back? And then again, why any disease? And if disease, why medicine?

Why was nature so eager to fall over itself in making more and more weak, more and more frail, and then let the one disease that walked on its surface get away with cures? What was God’s holy plan there?

Two answers come to mind, and they both have their merits.

One

There is no holy plan. Everyone, Everything is in this, alone.

Two

Nature is the ultimate masochist. And suicidal.

Bonjour!

The moment you wake up in the morning; that stretch where you cannot open your eyes fully or feel your conspiring arms trying to lift you up, is probably the most lucid instant of the entire day. Those two seconds where no one can begin to contemplate anything other than two inches of sunlight in their eyes make every morning a new day.

What decides the course of your day, however, is unfortunately not this moment. No, that moment comes about half an hour later, around the time when you're stepping out of the bathroom and reaching for that coffee mug. When the cogs of your cognition suddenly whirr into action, and contemplate the day that went past, and using some complex method that I can only imagine is akin to the one they use at my office, forecasts your mood for the day.

Now, this mood does not make your day good or bad; how can it. What it does is change the little things you do; the skip in your step, the cheeriness of a “Good Morning!” or the look on your face when you think no one around you is looking. That moment is the reason people who’re curious enough to investigate that look (for people are ALWAYS looking) will come up to you and say one of two things:
1. My, you look happy today!
2. What happened? Is everything okay?

As the evening wanes though, the course of the day pretty much takes over, and your mood finally belongs to today. Do note, the reason you say either of these:
1. Let’s go out for pizza!
2. Where the hell is my dinner?
Is not that moment; but you can be sure it helped you get there.

So, if your moments are the kind where you generally choose the latter of the two responses, probably the best gift for you would be a blunt instrument to the back of the head every morning as soon as you pop out of the, well, pooper.

Humanity Fail

I feel ashamed today. Ashamed, helpless, and livid at my city, my country, the entire class of human beings claiming to be from my gender, but most importantly, at the alleged leaders of my city, country, commune who so much as dare to look at today and the horizon and tell me to my face that things are GOOD.

How can anyone claim that our country is progressing, that our society, far from being the decadent cesspool that it is, is in fact vibrant and active and climbing the ladder of success, when we haven’t yet so much as approached the first step? What good is anything we have, anywhere across the world, if we can’t guarantee the most basic of human needs: safety, to all our denizens, and especially to that half who we claim openly in our chauvinist, ribald moments as the weaker gender? What is the point of a term like that, if the corresponding term for men isn’t the slacker or helpless gender (in equal measure)? Or even, in fact, the decadent, sick or perverted gender?

I lately watched an episode of The West Wing, when the president is faced with a dilemma. A citizen of his country is shot down by terrorists, and he is asked to respond proportionally. I quote verbatim from his speech, asking the virtue of a proportional, tolerant response instead of an outright onslaught against the propagators:

“Did you know that two thousand years ago a Roman citizen could walk across the face of the known world free of the fear of molestation? He could walk across the Earth unharmed, cloaked only in the protection of the words Civis Romanus -- I am a Roman citizen. So great was the retribution of Rome, universally certain, should any harm befall even one of its citizens.”

Where is this protection today? And why is it not even guaranteed anymore even to a citizen walking across his or her own country? Why is it that the people we do finally end up punishing still don’t deter the rest from following in their path? Why do our laws not STOP crime? I know we’re supposed to accept such minor acts as a tenet and live our lives, but WHY? Why can’t we hold our government, and our people up to a standard we WANT them to be at? Why is crime of any malice accepted at all?

You may term me and idealist and my views impractical when I look towards a society free from any type of criminal act, and people with perfectly reasonable thoughts. But I’m not budging from the fact that any society where even a single act of malicious intent goes unpunished is just NOT worth being proud of. You didn’t want a society based on love, fine. You made a society of rules. Rigidly defined rules of blind, fierce justice. Why then, now that you have the rules and people who know and accept the rules that exist, can you not carry out your bloody vision?

Abstractions in Romance

The Scene: Midnight, in an empty bar. Shelves in the back, replete with exquisite liquor, their colour reflected from a long mirror above, running along the length of the bar counter, its wood burnished a dull gold with the light above. Man and Woman, alone, together, close, their drinks in front of them (Scotch for Him, Daiquiri for Her). French windows behind them show nothing but a full moon in the distance. No one else around.

Woman: (contemplative, staring at her glass) Tragedy never strikes when one is in the throes of sorrow. It has a knack for picking the sweetest, happiest moments to descend and skewer a heart. Is it life’s way of being merciful to man in his sorrow, or painful in his joy? (To Him, smiling) I absolutely loved our day together; it was all I ever wished for; in fact, much more. And yet...

Man: I did what I did because I wanted to. I love you, and a day in your life spent happy is a day in mine fulfilled. (Aloud, to no one) Our choices are all made long ago, even indecision is a choice we are conditioned in. Mercy, sorrow, pain, joy are all bad substitutes for us letting surprise rule our existence.

Woman: (To the glass) And still we live so, only peeling the surface of our existence, playing a fool’s game with a brilliant hope, not so that we might delay the inevitable, but to keep at bay the very knowledge that there is a limit to our actions, a limit we made ourselves, a limit we cannot cross. (To Him) Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to stay for another drink? I would if you’d only say you want me to.

Man: (Smiling genially) Oh, No! Not at all! I’ll be quite all right here. I won’t be long after you’re gone, anyway. (Blankly staring above at a point in the mirror) Reflections in space are needlessly complicated. And deceitful. They never cease to remind you that ever distant is ever smaller.

Woman: (To the glass) Hmm... At least those in time are courteous, if nothing else. They wait for you to come back once you walk away; ever clear, ever honest. The murkiness here is in you, not in time. (Downs what’s left of her drink. To Him) Well, I must be getting along! He’ll be waiting for me outside by now.

Man: And if he isn’t?

Woman: Then I’ll be waiting for him! Goodbye! I’ll miss you.

Man: Goodbye dear.

Woman walks out in the shadows. Man stares at the glass for a minute, picks it up, and finishes the drink in a gulp.

Man: (Slowly, whispering)
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang,
But a whimper.

He gets up, opens the French window, takes a deep breath, and steps out. 15 seconds later a taxi parked on the side of the road, next to a hotel is destroyed by a man falling with great speed through its roof.

Summer Days

(Pubby's Note: Well, it’s been a while now, and I haven’t written anything I can put up on my blog; thought I’d describe a typical day at my summer training/internship. Also, now that I’m in solitary again, I have returned to my non-proofed narrative thinking/writing. So here goes)

This place is huge. In length, breadth, and height. And the number of people. And it’s organised. Thoroughly. From people to paper clips. There’s umpteen departments, different machine shops, foundries, core shops, and loads of other things that are all supposed to do their own little bit to add value to the whole. Some seem to work more, some less, but all of them pretty much curse one another in a tussle for one-upmanship where the only benefit they may accrue is respect from a management that they don’t respect.

My day here usually starts with a glass of water, 5 minutes on gtalk (via gmail) and 20 minutes or so of solitaire on my cellphone while I wait for it to strike 10. Then on, I move to my cabin, a deserted room that three General Managers have occupied (and left) in the last 8 months. It’s a nice room, half-white, half-wooden, with a polished desk and a monitor and mouse with well-concealed wires, and nobody’s the wiser that they lead to nothing. I like the desk, though it does cause some awkwardness when people walk in to ask how you're getting along. You can see that it’s the office they’ve been wanting for months, maybe years, one that has been callously given away to the boss’s son for 6 weeks. I try to make it less awkward, standing up when they come in, asking them not to sit on the opposite side, sometimes keeping us both standing; doesn’t really change much though.

I have 4 books in this room to keep me occupied. One is a CNC programming manual, another’s a Thomas Hardy novel, and the other two are CAT prep books. I keep to the first two. Before half an hour of perusing them is over, though, someone always drops in to ask me if I’d like to go to one machine shop or the other for a hands-on programming experience, or just to see how stuff works. It’s generally an offer you just can’t refuse, everything outside the office is way too fascinating to miss. I can pass several hours in the machine shop without a break. As I said, there’s lots going on here, and I want to go out knowing as much as possible, though I really don’t know why.

Afternoons are nice, lunch generally lasts an hour, and I get a lot of wisdom talk and those-were-the-days dialogues from dad and his friend-and-colleague. It’s fun, really, to see people can be this chilled out with 30 projects going on simultaneously.

Post-lunch is dreary though. I return to the manual, but sleep generally tries to butt in in about half an hour. To keep myself up, I go out of the nice, 25 degrees C atmosphere to the blasting, at least 50 outside, and take a promenade around the place. I always end up passing by the ferrous foundry, hoping maybe today I’ll have the courage to step in. But no. Needless to say, it’s the volcano of the plant; but here in the heat there’s something very wrong about it. Even when you’re about 6 feet away you can hardly see anything inside. There’s a black fog of iron ore at the entrance, interrupted only by tired people, covered with soot, with shirts torn at the seams coming out at intervals with a trolley of castings, escorting them to a salon that thinks nothing of hacking away at them at 3000rpm to make them shapely. They have a scarf around their heads and what looks like a surgical mask on. The situation is so depressing you forget the humour in two guys walking side-by-side pushing the trolley, almost clasping hands. No. Not today. Maybe tomorrow.

Post lunch I generally go bug someone in a machine shop. The initial shyness of approaching them just melts under the heat. The first thing I learnt here probably was that it isn’t school or college. People actually want to teach you here. Everybody’s motivated by the fact that they’ve done something in their lives, and they’re all very willing to tell you about it. Every day I hear the words, “It’s really good you’re doing this right now. You’ll get to learn a lot, if you pay attention”. I don’t know if it’s that or the fact that the guys now have someone willing, even eager to hear them about their work, and how they make a living, but our own ideas seem to give us both some gratification.

Past 6 is generally a bore. I gather my books and move back into dad’s office, where we both sit around and chat, waiting for my uncle to get free from his workplace. The wait has been anywhere from an hour to two for 9 out of the last 10 days (the 10th day dad was late by that amount).

A dull ride back home follows. It’s always Red FM playing in the car. Non-stop. I now remember not just the order of the songs, but the ads and other sound bytes meant for our “infotainment” as well. Real estate ads are annoying, and targeting just the wrong people. Listening to the government-recorded PSU employment ad is like seeing a man desperate to pass a mirage off as an oasis, even if it means drinking the sand. It’s bad, and not fooling any one. Radios need a revolution.

A BITS Tale

[Pubby's Note: This post is mostly fiction, and very mildly fact. Please do not take it seriously]

A long, long time ago, in the land of Rajputana, there was a small, peaceful kingdom in the region of Gaumukh. The kingdom was called Dosamgarh, and it was a fast-growing realm of businessmen; people who liked to speak, to negotiate, to cut deals, and to gather goods and money.

This money they gathered wasn’t for their own personal needs, although the drinks they got they generally kept to themselves. The money was used to hold the three big festivals, held every year in the honour of Tukdeydev, the lord of culture, innovation and sports. The festivals were the most important affair in Gaumukh; so important that the king of Dosamgarh used to spend his entire life working for them, and his scions were the high priests of the festivals.

After a few years, though, it became apparent that Gaumukh had become a very desolate place. Most people who used to live there had either emigrated to other parts of the land, or had become denizens of Dosamgarh itself, now one of the greatest kingdoms in Rajputana. As a result, the people who used to attend the three festivals dwindled sharply, and it was clear that this state of affairs could not go on for long.

After much debate and discussion, it was decided by the Elder Council that Dosamgarh could not ensure the entire well-being, and it was vital to create another territory, which would ensure that people from all of Rajputana come to Gaumukh for the three festivals. This kingdom was to be called Depnagar, and to ensure that it functions well, the founding fathers of Depnagar were picked from among the princes and ministers of Dosamgarh; now a smaller, humbler state.

Things went fine for the first few years. The festival attendees kept on growing, the money kept pouring in, and Dep and Dosam, though they were never the most cordial of neighbours, worked along fine enough to ensure that Tukdeydev was pleased.

There came one year, though, where all this changed suddenly. Since the formation of Depnagar, the three festivals had had joint high priests, each a prince in his own kingdom. One year, the high priests of Karak, 2 learned men named Ved Vasa and Rishi Kesh, discovered an instant disdain for each other’s way of working (worship is work, after all), and decided to ignore each other’s efforts for Karak until the festival would be over.

The ensuing discord soon cut any lines of friendship the two kingdoms might have had. Both Depnagar and Dosamgarh, now huge states equal in size and power, started doing what any 2 kingdoms of equal size and power do when at loggerheads; they started seizing more power, looking for more work to do in order to prove Karak was their brainchild. It is hardly a surprise that Karak did not go as planned that year. There were at least 8 cases where Karak failed to live up to the standards it had set the year before.

The storm over the smooth functioning of Karak (or the lack thereof) spilled so much bad blood between the two dominions that it looked like they were doomed for an eternity of hatred towards each other. Only a miracle could save them now.

Miraculously though, the embitterment, did not last overlong. As it happens, it was not hate that drove away hate, but a seed of affection that saved them from perpetual destruction. A stalwart prince of Depnagar fell for a charming princess of Dosamgarh, and their secret meetings away from the leaguer sprouted the softening of many a heart on both sides of the border.

Today, the two monarchies still coexist, working once again for the three festivals, with something of the old cordiality coming back, and growing steadily by the constant presence and efforts of the young couple.


And how do I know all this? Well, my dear readers, I was also one of the princes and high priests of Depnagar. With my festival behind me and my prayers to Tukdeydev all but answered, I have now taken, what can only be described as Sanyaas, from Rajputana. I spend my days now loitering around river beds and distant lakes, in Remembrance of Things Past.

In Search of Lost Time

For more months than I can care to count now, life’s been a series of hard, unrewarding toils, trials and tribulations. An extended spate of failed endeavours, half measures, backstabbing, exhaustion, the occasional exhilaration, jugaad, meetings, rage, hopelessness, helplessness and what all.

Recently there’s been this obsession with the idea of all these efforts culminating into one giant release at Waves, which, apart from being the most kick-ass thing we could hope to organise in less than half the time an annual cultural festival should be done in, shall also be a confluence of bedraggled coordinators finally letting it ALL out, enjoying to their wits’ end, staying perhaps buzzed, drunk, stoned or just energetic at the festival where they helped bring about so much. Whatever had happened in the months previous, let it slide; these three days will be the stuff to tell your children when they enter college, if not their children in turn.

Until a couple of days ago, my plans were the same; get baked, stay baked, watch the events, observe the crowd, enjoy the food, sleep blissfully for 2 hours each night, and end it with one LONG sigh, and moist eyes (to taste).

Certain thoughts of a contemplative nature over the past few days though have made me edit my blissful plan to something much more practical and realisable. The current plan is as follows:
Wake up, take a bath, sit in room, stay in room, venture out for occasional snack.

And here are the reasons for it:

1. The whole plan sounds a bit too much like Bing’s comic strip about the 11:30 rule in campus going away. The DoTA server may start an hour late, but beer rain, superchix, and world peace in one night (or for that matter, three) are a little too much to ask.
2. I’ve often stated (and if I haven’t, it’s only because the only time this can be said is a bad time to say it) that it’s the gap between expectations and reality that hurts more upon observation than the reality itself. Better not to hope for stuff than to set high hopes and dash them like a beer bottle against a rock on the beach.
3. How will all this help in the end anyway? Getting baked and listening to good music doesn’t make you happy; it either just blunts the edge of pain or enhances the happiness already there. It won’t at all help me fix one of the worst personal crises I’ve had in my life, and which I haven’t had much time for over these months. It’ll just delay it by another 3 days, after which I’ll have to deal with it.
4. The fall thing again; all this enjoyment, if realised, shall end with the BIGGEST case of Post-Waves Blues ever; and that won’t really help with point 3 above.

So why am I still working for all this? I don’t know. Maybe because it’s become a habit by now. Maybe because to drop out now would be just like treachery. And maybe because somewhere deep down, I like doing something that doesn’t let me watch TV series and movies on my laptop at night. Whatever the deal, I shall see it through, so until then, Adios!